HPI shrinks to grow in U.S.

Home Products International (HPI; Chicago), a maker of consumer and houseware goods with 80% of its manufacturing in the U.S., has announced a $10 million investment in its Chicago and El Paso, TX plants, including the addition of 15 injection molding machines to the Chicago facility and a doubling of machine capacity in Texas.

HPI estimates these expansions will require 150 additional full-time employees between the two plants. While these operations grow, however, HPI announced consolidations in its other domestic plastics operations, including the shuttering of plants in Louisiana, Missouri, and Georgia, affecting 260 full- and part-time employees.

South African processor invests in shrink, stretch hood equipment

South African plastics processor, Venk-Pac (Canelands) has recently ordered a three-layer coextrusion line from blown-film extrusion line manufacturer Kiefel Extrusion (Worms, Germany) that will mainly be used to produce web for heavy and bulky goods.

According to Ricky Naidoo, Venk-Pac owner, the company not only wants to serve the rapidly growing demand for stretch hoods in the region around the Cape of Good Hope but also increasingly for export markets.

Naidoo said he needed a line that could be delivered quickly to enable large quantities of film for stretch hoods to start production in April next year. The Kirion unit features a coated three-layer blown-film die head; universal, specially hardened screws; gravimetric dosing; and an oscillating haul-off. Naidoo says the line''s modular construction will help Venk-Pac quickly switch to other types of film without excess downtime.

Venketes Naidoo, the father of today''s owner, started Royal Plastics and Poly Products in 1967. It was the first African producer of polymer drinking straws. Ricky Naidoo succeeded his father, founding Venk-Pac in 1998 with 15 employees to produce flexible packaging. Today the operation has a staff of 220 and a film capacity output of 1200 tonnes/month.

Besides extruding drinking straws, the operation also produces shrink packaging for the furniture industry, printed and unprinted shrink wraps for bulk goods, films for FFS food packaging, carrier bags, heavy-duty fertilizer sacks, and film for the construction industry. Venk-Plast has 17 mono- and multilayer blown-film extrusion lines.

Biodegradable prepaid phone cards make entry into European Market

UV Color (UVC, Roseville, MN) is offering European prepaid telephone providers and retailers an alternative to petroleum-based plastics phone cards with the introduction of Earthsource, a line of phone cards 95% made from polylactic acid (PLA), based on non-genetic manipulated field maize (U.S. corn) or sugar beets. The cards can either be burned cleanly during incineration or composted in an industrial facility.

"The use of pre-paid phone cards in Europe is on the rise," says Jim Keister, marketing manager of UVC. He says the Earthsource cards provide retailers with more environmentally responsible solutions to traditional ones.

The cards are extruded in a flat sheet from NatureWorks PLA. The sheets are then printed, bar-coded, and imaged. They are also packaged in a tamper-proof Earthsource wrapping. Keister says there is no difference in the look or feel of these cards to traditional ones.

Polish polyolefins plant officially opens

Basell Orlen Polyolefins (BOP, Plock, Poland) has officially been started with a capacity of 400,000 tonnes/yr of polypropylene (PP) and 320 tonnes/yr of high-density polyethylene (HDPE). Following 2.5 years of planning and construction and an investment of €500 million, the unit has come onstream, and output is targeted for domestic and Eastern European demand. The company already has an existing low-density PE plant at the site.

"We are proud and glad about the fact that this gigantic, multiplatform BOP project has been successfully completed [on-time]," says Hartmut Lueker, president of BOP. Consumption of polyolefins in Poland now is running at more than GDP with growth of +10%/yr. Lueker says he expects this investment to spur further international investment in the Polish processing sector.

North African processor warms to refrigerator-liner market

An unidentified North African processor will soon be taking delivery of manufacturing equipment from maker Gruppo Colines (Nibba, Italy) to produce high-impact polystyrene sheets to be thermoformed for refrigerator liners. Tested recently at the equipment manufacturer''s facility, the web width from the line is 1000 mm and sheet thickness ranges from 1.3 to 6 mm. The line is equipped with two extruders, one with a 120-mm diameter screw and the other with a 60-mm screw. They provide an output of up to 600 kg/hr.

The equipment was also tested for possible production of PP sheet with hot lamination of a five-layer barrier web consisting of PP/tie/EVOH/tie/PE. According to Gruppo Colines, the processor wants to produce this construction for industrial thermoformed trays for foodstuff and medical applications.

Hokkai Can licenses Graham technology

Japanese packaging giant Hokkai Can Co. Ltd. (Tokyo) has acquired a license allowing it to make use of the active transverse panel (ATP) technology for making and filling panel-free hot-fill PET bottles. The technology was developed by Graham Packaging Co. (York, PA).

The ATP technology, introduced last year in the U.S., eliminates the need for vacuum-uptake panels to be designed into PET bottles intended for hot filling. These panels limit design options, especially labeling options, and also add to a bottle''s weight.

Hokkai Can expects to begin stretch blowmolding bottles with ATP designs by the middle of 2006. The licensee will use the technology to offer another option to aseptic filling, according to Toshi Kojitani, director of PET products for Graham Packaging.

Dow gains new licensee for EXO overmolding process

Japan''s SOL-PLUS Co. Ltd., an injection molder serving the cosmetic and precision mechanical parts markets and member of the ARRK Global Network of companies, is the latest licensee of the EXO overmolding process developed and offered by the Inclosia Solutions business of The Dow Chemical Co.

EXO overmolding enables molders to overmold with real fabrics, leathers, woods, and metals with little or no cycle-time penalty, according to Inclosia (see related article in June 2005 MPW). The most recently developed EXO process enables molders to overmold with inserts of two different materials in a single step.

Inclosia also announced that one of its licensees, Taiwan Green Point Enterprises Co. Ltd. (Taichung) is using the technology to mold the Alcantara suede wrist rests found on the recently launched Packard Bell (EasyNote W7 Series) Notebook. The Packard Bell EasyNote W7 Series notebook has been available in European retail outlets since July 2005.

Worldwide perspective on additive fabrication

Each year, Wohlers Assoc. (Ft. Collins, CO) estimates the number of additive-fabrication systems sold and installed in all countries around the world. Additive fabrication refers to fabrication of a part by adding materials to a substrate or previously formed portions of a part. Typically this involves forming with a layered approach. The term is also used as a synonym for rapid prototyping.

Among the countries with a sizeable installed base of systems, the U.S. lost the most ground, dropping from 43% to 37.7%. Its share was expected to decline as China and other countries modernize product-development methods and embrace additive processes. Germany increased its share worldwide by 1.8%, while the UK grew by 1.6%.

The largest gain (4.4%) was in the "other" category, which consists of countries that have been mostly off the "radar screen" in the past. South Africa, for example, grew from two systems sold in 2003 to 15 sold last year. Mexico grew from five to 26, and Russia grew from nine to 29. Meanwhile, Canada grew by an impressive 4.4 times, according to estimates from Wohlers Assoc.

For more information on the Rapid Prototyping industry, see the Wohlers Report 2005, a 256-pg global market study, available at http://wohlersassociates.com.

Batteries charge up opportunities for plastics

Wireless and handheld devices, increasingly independent of electrical wall sockets, will continue to push growth in battery and fuel-cell materials, including plastics, with average annual growth in the U.S. pegged at 5.9% through 2009, reaching $3.4 billion by 2009. This according to a report from The Freedonia Group (Cleveland, OH) that says the strongest increases in demand will be seen in carbon/graphite and polymers, with polymers growing by 9.3%/yr over the next five years, although these currently represent less than 10% of the overall battery and fuel-cell materials market in 2004.

Fluoropolymers will stand to benefit from fuel-cell advances as well as lithium and zinc-air batteries, and nanomaterial applications in batteries and fuel cells are expected to hit a market value of $1 billion by 2020.

Electrodes, which are the largest functional category for materials, are currently the focus of intensive research working towards reducing costs while improving performance. Freedonia believes that all materials used in fuel-cell components will record double-digit annual gains as output rises from a small base.

Honeywell composite takes off in Marine helicopters

Honeywell Specialty Materials (Morris Township, NJ) announced last week that its Spectra Shield composite material is being used to armor 164 U.S. Marine Corps Sea Knight helicopters. ArmorWorks, a provider of armor technology for U.S. military applications and companies worldwide, is using the material in Light Weight Armor Replacement System (LWARS) kits for the helicopters, which are used by the Marine Corps to provide all-weather, day-or-night assault transport of combat troops, supplies, and equipment.

"Spectra Shield composite is ideal for this vehicle armoring due to its excellent overall performance," said Bill Perciballi, president and founder of ArmorWorks. "It boasts outstanding impact resistance, complements other ballistic materials, and easily conforms to the irregular contours of both small and large vehicles." ArmorWorks is producing the kits at its manufacturing facility in Tempe, AZ.

Spectra Shield is a composite material made with Honeywell''s Spectra fiber, which reportedly has the highest strength-to-weight ratio of any synthetic fiber, including nylon, polyester, and aramid. Pound for pound, Spectra fiber is 10 times stronger than steel, yet its density is so low that it floats. Over the past four years, Honeywell has produced fiber and composite materials that have gone into more than 475,000 protective vests and armor plates, the vast majority used for military personnel.

Ticona PPS expansion continues apace

The $65 million expansion of the Fortron polyphenylene sulfide plant in Wilmington, N.C., has passed a series of initial milestones including the completion of preliminary engineering and process design, and putting the purchasing process in place for long-lead items. Ticona, a business unit of Celanese Corp., with U.S. headquarters in Florence, K.Y., noted in a recent press release that Jacobs Engineering Group has been chosen to do detailed engineering and procurement for the project.

The expansion, which is being done by Fortron Industries, a joint venture of Ticona Technical Polymers and Kureha Corp., will double the capacity of the existing Fortron PPS plant to 15,000 metric tons per year. When completed in the first half of 2007, the expansion will create the world''s largest PPS plant. The current plant came on stream in 1993.

Prize winners feted in Switzerland

Three winners of the Quadrant Award, sponsored by Quadrant, manufacturer of performance thermoplastics and composites, were recently announced. Taking top prize of €15,000 was Laurence Mathieu of France who wrote her thesis at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland on "Processing of porous polymer composites for bone-tissue engineering". The panel of jurors tapped Mathieu''s work because "She was driving innovative ideas into an impressive realization in the highly complex and trans-disciplinary field of biomaterials." They said her thesis showed particular understanding of both the theoretical possibilities and practical limitations involved in creation of these emerging materials.

Second-place prizes, worth €5000 awards each, went to Juan P. Hernández-Ortiz from the University of Wisconsin-Madison for his study entitled "Boundary integral equations for viscous flows - non-Newtonian behavior and solid inclusions" and Jan K.W. Sandler from Cambridge University for his work "Structure-property-relationships of carbon nanotubes/nanofibers and their polymer composites."

Prior to the awards presentation ceremony, the jury nominated six candidates from the entries received, who had the opportunity to present their work to the jury in Lenzburg, Switzerland. Jurors for this selection were professors who came from three European universities. Swiss artist Beat Zoderer designed the award.

Borealis recognized for plant safety

Polyolefins producer Borealis has been tapped to receive the Safety Award in the Business Impact category at the 2005 DuPont Leaders Forum in Geneva. The prize, one of five presented this year, recognizes projects in the workplace related to safety or society-at-large that have been led by individuals, companies, or organizations. Borealis'' four European production hubs and international compounding units have been able to decrease their Total Recordable Injuries (TRI) from 16.3 in 1996 to 1.9 by the end of Oct. 2005.

Weekly futures activity from the LME

Futures trading of linear low-density polyethylene (LLDPE) and polypropylene (PP) on the London Metal Exchange (LME) for the week of Nov. 21-25 saw a low price for LLDPE of $1075/tonne set on Monday, Nov. 21 for December buyers. LLDPE''s high of $1150/tonne was reached on Wednesday Nov. 23 for February sellers.

For PP, a low price of $1025/tonne was reached on Monday, Nov. 21 for December buyers. The high of $1125/tonne came on Thursday, Nov. 24 and Friday, Nov. 25 for February sellers.

Names in the News

Polyolefins producer Borealis (Kongens Lyngby, Denmark) has appointed Christian Ambjerg to the position of VP wire and cable. He is based in Mechelen, Belgium. He was previously group VP business development in Denmark.

Vinyltech plans Phoenix pipe expansion

PVC pipe manufacturer Vinyltech Corp. has plans to add a new blending system and two extrusion lines to its Phoenix, AZ headquarters, increasing the company''s capacity by 40%. The company said construction will begin in early 2006 and be completed by 2007, with new equipment up and running at that point. Vinyltech''s pipe is primarily used by municipal water, wastewater, and reclaimed water systems.

Lanxess cuts excess in ABS

As the company consolidates operations and shifts ABS production to Tarragona, Spain, resin manufacturer Lanxess (Leverkusen, Germany) will remove its Lustran ABS M202AS, M301AS, and M304 resins from its range effective March 31, 2006. Going forward, Lanxess'' Dormagen, Germany plant will only produce specialty intermediates.