Industry News
Service Solutions, to develop and market new offerings and also be home to the classic service offering. • Austria-headquartered Wittmann Group, which manufactures injection moulding machines, robots and peripheral equipment, has extended its facility in Nuremberg, Germany. Following the opening of the extension, the total amount of usable floor space in the office bulding is now 1,800 sq m.The production hall has a total floor space of 3,000 sq m, which includes a 300 sq m technical lab and 750 sq m of warehouse facilities. • Extrusion machinery maker Windmöller & Hölscher (W&H) has inaugurated a new show room for woven PP machinery in Taicang, China. It showcases the Convertex, which heat seals woven PP cross bottom bags and thus eliminates the need of glue for this type of bags. During the last ten years the output of the bottomer has more than doubled, from 60 bags/ minute to 140 in the latest model. Today, the product range features machines with capacities of 80, 100, 120 and 140 bags/minute.
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JUNE / JULY 2018
• German chemical firm BASF has inaugurated its new EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) Application centre for Plastic Additives in Kaisten, Switzerland. The new facility, located in the existing BASF production site, includes a compounding extruder, stretch film and tape lines as well as an injection moulding unit capable of simulating the polymer production and processing technology. • DuPont Industrial Biosciences (IB) has officially opened the doors of its renovated global business headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware. The revitalisation of what is known as Building E353 is part of a more than US$200 million investment in DuPont’s Experimental Station campus, which began in 2016 and encompasses about 50 buildings, with over 2 million sq ft of space. • Japan’s Teijin has broken ground on a new carbon-fibre production facility at its wholly owned subsidiary Teijin Carbon Fibers in the US. The facility is expected to create some 220 jobs with
US$600 million worth of investments by 2030. • Dutch chemicals firm AkzoNobel has started production in its new EUR40 million powder coatings plant in Changzhou, China, touted as one of the largest of its kind in the world. It will also collaborate with one of AkzoNobel's largest technology centres based in Shanghai. • Ineos Oxide is constructing a 270 kilotonnes/year Ethylene Oxide (EO) and Ethylene Oxide Derivatives (EOD) facility on the US Gulf Coast, targeted to be operational by 2022. It is considering several sites and is well advanced in evaluating competing EO technologies. Confirmation of the investment location and technology partner are expected later this year. • German oxo intermediates/ derivatives maker Oxea’s new worldscale propanol production unit at its Bay City site in Texas, US, is mechanically complete. The new facility is scheduled for commercial production in the third quarter of 2018. With a nameplate capacity of 100,000 tonnes/ year of n-propanol,
it is currently one of Oxea’s largest investment projects. • Spanish thermoplastics manufacturer Elix Polymers is investing EUR4 million to optimise its ABS powder production facility, to have access for its own production of ABS and ABS compounds. It will also enable it to access new markets in the NAFTA region and Asia. The project is expected to commence this year and consolidate in 2019. • DuPont Safety & Construction, a business unit of DowDuPont Specialty Products Division, is investing US$400 million to expand capacity for the manufacture of Tyvek nonwoven materials at its facility in Luxembourg. The production expansion, which will add a new building and third operating line at the site, is scheduled to start up in 2021. • French chemicals firm Arkema is raising its specialty polyamides powders by more than 50% at its Mont site in France. The expansion is scheduled to come on stream in the second half of 2019.