Sumitomo Rubber to lift Thai tire output capacity

MOSCOW (MRC) -- Sumitomo Rubber Industries will boost auto tire production capacity at a key site in Thailand by 9% on strong exports to the US and anticipated sales growth in Southeast Asia, as per GV.

The Japanese maker of Dunlop tires will raise capacity at a Rayong Province location where it began production at two factories in 2006 and 2007. Capacity there came to 78,000 tires a day at the end of last year, and the facilities have continued to operate at around full capacity. Daily capacity will climb to 85,000 by the end of the year and could even reach 100,000 in a few years, depending on how demand develops.

Sumitomo Rubber ended capital and business ties with US rival Goodyear Tire & Rubber in June, giving it more freedom to develop the American and European markets. The Thai site is one of the largest tire production locations in the world, and the Japanese company will use it to supply overseas markets.

Easy access to natural rubber makes the site cost-competitive compared with those in other countries. The site manufactures a wide array of products, from commodity-grade tires to high-value-added offerings, and accounts for about 20% of Sumitomo Rubber's global capacity. About 80% of the output is exported, and sales of its Falken brand in the US are growing.

As MRC wrote previously, Japan's Sumitomo Chemical Co began to mothball the ageing 415,000 tpa naphtha cracker at its Chiba plant from 11 May 2015. To offset lost production, in April, Sumitomo Chemical raised its stake in Maruzen Petrochemical Co's 55-percent-owned unit Keiyo Ethylene to 45 percent and will receive 59.4 percent of petrochemical output from the venture's naphtha cracker.

Sumitomo Chemical is a Japanese based manufacturer of a diverse range of products, including basic chemicals, petrochemicals and plastics, fine chemicals, agricultural chemicals, IT-related chemicals and pharmaceuticals.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- Ice River Springs, a Canadian-owned bottler, has opened a new multi-million dollar bottled water plant in Lachute, Que, said Canplastics.

The plant will be Ice River Springs’ 13th in North America, and is intended to provide increased capacity to support the production of bottled water for their private label customers and for Ice River Green, a brand made of 100 per cent recycled PET.

In a statement relating to the plant opening, the company described itself as the only beverage company in North America to self-manufacture their own bottles in a closed loop recycling system. "This pioneering operation takes in PET packaging from municipal recycling programs, sorts, purifies and then produces certified food-grade plastic ready for reuse in 100 per cent recycled water bottles," it said.

"There is enough plastic in the world today, we just need to find ways to reuse it," said Jamie Gott, CEO of Ice River Springs, "and this new plant will further our mission to develop products and processes that are better for people and better for the planet".

As it was written earlier, Loblaw Companies Limited (Loblaw), Canada’s largest retailer, awarded Ice River Springs Corporate Social Responsibility supplier of the year for 2015.

Founded in 1995, Ice Rivers Springs is said to be one of the largest water bottling manufacturers in North America with bottling plants located in Canada and the U.S.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- Solvay, a leading international chemical group, has announced that its Move4earth project for the recycling of technical textile waste from post-industrial sources is well on target. Validation of the technology has been completed, and construction is underway for an industrial-scale facility to become operational in 2016 at the project site in Gorzow, Poland, as per the company's press release.

Move4earth project is one of several Solvay initiatives supported by the European Commission as part of its LIFE+ program and demonstrates the company’s ongoing strong commitment to sustainable development. The project is focused on designing, implementing and validating an innovative recycling process designed to revalue technical textile waste, initially from airbags, into high-quality polyamide 6.6 (PA6.6) grades with reduced environmental impacts to complement Solvay Engineering Plastics’ Technyl Force portfolio of engineering polymers.

"The demand for cost-efficient yet high-performance recycled plastics is growing across all European markets, as processors and OEMs are seeking to reduce their dependency on fossil resources whose prices are rather volatile and constantly rising," says Peter Browning, Solvay Engineering Plastics General Manager. "In addition, a revision of the waste legislation will be released by the European Commission by the end of 2015. As part of the Circular Economy Communication, new legislative initiatives on eco-design and recycling are anticipated by major customers in all PA6.6 markets. Most of them are already targeting recycle contents in their products over 20 percent by 2020." Browning emphasized, "Move4earth underscores our efforts aimed at reducing the environmental footprint of our activities and those of our customers, and it confirms our dedicated reliance on European industrial assets."

The project also addresses a need for more effective recycling solutions to help minimize large volumes of valuable engineering plastic waste. "More than 70 percent of all automotive airbags in Europe are made of silicone-coated nylon fabrics, mostly based on PA 6.6," explains Richard Bourdon, Move4earth™ Project Director at Solvay. "While regulations such as directive 2000/53/EC are setting high targets for end-of-life recycling and reuse of materials in vehicles, there is no sustainable solution in place for post-consumer airbag waste in Europe. Our mid-term objective is to establish an efficient and sustainable way of re-using these resources and provide pure high-grade PA6.6 recycle compounds with stable properties near those of virgin Technyl resins for a wide range of eco-designed applications," Bourdon concluded.

To these ends, Solvay has developed an advanced proprietary recycling technology for separating the airbag fabrics from the coating. The innovative process delivers a PA6.6 premium recycle with no significant loss in material properties, including stable viscosity and robust mechanical performance.

As MRC reported earlier, Solvay Specialty Polymers has expanded its Amodel AE-8900 series of products for automotive electronics applications by adding five new glass fiber-reinforced grades with glass filler ranging from 30 to 60%.

Solvay Specialty Polymers manufactures over 1500 products across 35 brands of high-performance polymers - fluoropolymers, fluoroelastomers, fluorinated fluids, semi-aromatic polyamides, sulfone polymers, aromatic ultra-high performance polymers, high-barrier polymers and cross-linked high-performance compounds - for use in Aerospace, Alternative Energy, Automotive, Healthcare, Membranes, Oil and Gas, Packaging, Plumbing, Semiconductors, Wire & Cable, and other industries.
MRC

MOSCOW (MRC) -- Tainan Spinning is in plans to shut its polyethylene terephthalate (PET) fibre grade chip plant for a brief maintenance work, according to Apic-online.

A Polymerupdate source in Taiwan informed that the plant is likely to be taken off-stream in November 2015. The exact duration of the shutdown could not be ascertained.

Located at Tainan in Taiwan, the plant has a production capacity of 60,000 mt/year.

We remind that, as MRC reported earlier, in April 2015, Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL), another major petrochemical producer in Asia, successfully put into operation two plants in Dahej, Gujarat, India. The first is a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) resin plant, which consists of two lines with a combined manufacturing capacity of 650 KTA. This is one of the largest bottle-grade PET resin capacity at a single location globally, and consolidates Reliance’s position as a leading PET resin producer with a global capacity of 1.15 MMTPA, the company said. The second facility is a new purified terephthalic acid (PTA) plant that provides a capacity of 1,150 KTA. With the commissioning of this plant, also built with Invista technology, Reliance’s total PTA capacity will increase to 3.2 MMTPA, and its global capacity share will rise to 4%.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- The Dow Chemical Company has announced the final proration factor of 21.00 percent for its exchange offer for shares of Dow common stock in connection with the transaction to separate its US Gulf Coast Chlor-Alkali and Vinyl, Global Chlorinated Organics and Global Epoxy businesses and merge those businesses with Olin Corporation, which successfully closed on October 5, 2015, said the producer on its site.

Based on the final count by the exchange agent, a total of 161,106,659 shares of Dow common stock were validly tendered in the exchange offer, including 341,686 shares tendered by shareholders who qualified for and elected odd-lot treatment. Shareholders who elected odd-lot treatment were not subject to proration, and their shares were fully accepted in the offer. All remaining tendered shares of Dow common stock were accepted in the exchange on a pro rata basis using the final proration factor of 21.00 percent. Shares of Dow common stock that were validly tendered but not accepted for exchange will be returned to tendering shareholders.

Dow offered 100,000,000 shares of Splitco common stock for distribution in exchange for shares of Dow common stock accepted in the offer. Following the closing of the split-off transaction, each share of Splitco common stock converted into the right to receive 0.87482759 shares of common stock of Olin Corporation. As a result, Dow shareholders who tendered their shares of Dow common stock in the exchange offer will receive approximately 2.5648 shares of Olin common stock (subject to receipt of cash in lieu of fractional shares) for each share of Dow common stock accepted for exchange. Dow was able to accept the maximum of 34,108,738 shares of Dow common stock for exchange in the offer, or nearly three percent of its outstanding common shares.

Dow expects the exchange to return approximately USD1.5 billion in value to shareholders, and effectively completes USD6.5 billion of its USD9.5 billion share repurchase program.

As MRC wrote before, Dow Chemical and Olin Corporation completed their chlor-alkali, chlorinated organics and epoxy asset merger at the beginning of the third quarter and have appointed new executives to the combined company that will operate under the Olin umbrella. The two new directors, designated by Dow in connection with the Reverse Morris Trust transaction, are William H. Weideman and Carol A. Williams.

The Dow Chemical Company is an American multinational chemical corporation. As of 2007, it is the second-largest chemical manufacturer in the world by revenue (after BASF) and as of February 2009, the third-largest chemical company in the world by market capitalization (after BASF and DuPont). Dow is a large producer of plastics, including polystyrene, polyurethane, polyethylene, polypropylene, and synthetic rubber.
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