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Polyolefin Business Re-Organisation
Those who use virgin polyethylene in WPC may have noticed several polyolefins businesses changing hands recently. Now INEOS has successfully completed the purchase of Innovene, BP’s olefins, derivatives and refining subsidiary. The acquisition creates a combined business with a turnover of around $33bn. The purchase of the Innovene business for $9bn fits well with the INEOS strategy to create a petrochemical company that has the scale to compete globally, supported by a sustainable cost base. The addition of the Lavéra and Grangemouth refineries also provides significant opportunities to integrate INEOS’s existing operations with upstream raw materials. INEOS will now begin the process of fully integrating Innovene into its organisation. The review of Innovene’s operations, products and markets, which began in October, quickly confirmed the complementary fit of the two companies, but the detailed design of the ongoing structure continues. Innovene will assume the INEOS name and be focused into product-line business entities, along similar lines to INEOS’s existing organisational model.
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Resin Prices Rise Steeply in 2005 and US Hurricane Damage Piles on the Pressure
The WPC manufacturing industry has been hit by rising crude oil and resin prices. Commodity resin prices have risen by 50% since the early summer and this comes after an even larger increase in 2004. The futures price of polypropylene on the London Metal Exchange has been around $1210 a tonne in the early autumn, softening as winter approaches to $1060 for the start of January 2006. In the US, natural gas is a more important resource of olefins than crude oil, being responsible for 70% of all the ethylene produced there, but prices of gas and ethylene have still risen; in fact gas in the US is about 60% more expensive there than in the UK, and ten times as high as in Russia. Ethylene prices have been further aggravated by capacity problems resulting from outages, not all of them from the autumn hurricanes. Dan Demers of A-top Polymers, Windham, NH, USA, says that American polyethylene producers have been operating flat out, just to deal with average demand levels. The selling price of WPC is high compared with softwood. If resin prices continue to rise over the next two or three years with increasing demand from China and India, there will be an incentive for WPC suppliers to push up wood: resin ratios in WPC to restrain material costs. The price of additives also depends on oil. But wood:resin ratios are already higher in Europe than the US, and there can be a fall-off in moisture resistance at very high wood levels. Another step would be for European producers to use more recycled resin (rather more than half the big US producers of WPC use recycled resin, but the proportion is much lower in Europe). Demers points out that "off-spec" resin is another alternative if you know where to find it. In the long term, resins will be made from non-oil sources, but it will take many years to organise their availability at acceptable prices and with satisfactory performance.
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Lack of Antioxidant Caused Warranty Claims
LDI Composites, an American decking company previously known as Kadant Composites, reported to the Intertech meeting on Natural Fiber and Wood Composites in Orlando, Florida (November 2005) that it had received 466 warranty claims relating to its GeoDeck products manufactured in 2002 and 2003. According to the company's research, insufficient antioxidant seemed to have been the cause: when a little more antioxidant was used, the problem disappeared. The defects mainly involved cracking and crumbling and were more common in hotter regions: 80% arose in the south of the USA, with far fewer in New England. Stress was a factor in 75% of cases. The company also confirmed that expected lifetimes were more than 20 times as great for decking situated in Boston as in Arizona. Laboratory experiments showed that a small amount of antioxidant increased probable lifetimes enormously. By the same criteria, examination of competitors' products showed a wide range of likely lifetimes. Metal stearates and other metallic compounds were thought likely to affect durability, according to the speaker, Anatole Klyosov, the company's Vice President for Research and Development. Kadant's products used HDPE as the resin.
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Wood Plastic Composites Continue to Generate Interest
The number of conferences relating to wood plastics composites (WPC) remains high. On 5-7 December 2005, AMI held its fourth meeting on the subject in Vienna, Austria, just two and a half weeks after Intertech's meeting in Orlando, Florida (14 -16 November) when Hackwell Group spoke about the European market for WPC. However, interest in WPC is no longer confined to specialist conferences and it is significantly beginning to feature in other programmes too. Professor Geoff Pritchard of Hackwell Group addressed the PIRA's meeting on Fillers, Pigments and Additives in Plastics (4-5 December, Brussels). Hackwell finds that a growing number of European companies are newly entering the WPC business. Most recently Deceuninck, the integrated, worldwide group specializing in compounds, extrusion, finishing, recycling and production of profiles for use in the construction sector, announced the start-up of WPC production in Europe. Deceuninck (a customer of Hackwell group reports on WPC) had already been making WPC in the US. Initially it will concentrate on production of WPC profiles for decking and cladding, with railing and fencing products likely to follow.
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First WPC Conference in Germany
The first conference on wood-plastics composites in Germany took place on 8th and 9th November 2005 in Köln. The conference was organised by Nova Institut and sponsored by major actors in the wood and plastic industries (from Germany and Austria) and supported by an exhibition.
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New Product Development Centre for WPC
The Ecublens (Switzerland) based company Maillefer SA specialises in wire, cable and pipe extrusion technology. Its Finnish subsidiary Maillefer Extrusions Oy has signed an agreement (June 3, 2005) with Conenor to operate a Skill Centre in Vantaa, Finland, where the WPC industry can develop wood and natural fibre products. Conenor licenses WPC extrusion technology based on its unusual Conex machine, which uses a rotary principle and can handle wet sawdust. Conenor also has wider interests in waste management technology.
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New Market Report on Plastics Additives
A new market report on plastics additives has been written by a member of the Hackwell Group, Professor Geoff Pritchard, who has organised the technical programmes for Rapra’s additives conferences for several years, and was formerly editor of Rapra’s additives newsletter. The conclusion is that the additives business has recovered from a very difficult period but prospects for future growth remain subject to a number of concerns such as oil prices, energy and raw materials costs and Far Eastern competition. The report contains a great deal of information largely derived from secondary sources up to the late autumn of 2004. Several very recent re-organisations are mentioned but the merger of Crompton with Great Lakes, two of the biggest additives companies, was only announced in February 2005, just as the report was going to press, and it is therefore only mentioned in the introductory section. Compared with most primary–source market research reports, the report is offered at a very competitive price and should prove good value to those who want to get up-to-date with the additives scene. This new report is available from Rapra Bookstore :
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Strandex licensees produce well over 100,000 tonnes /year It was reported at the Bordeaux conference on wood plastics composites (March 24-25, 2005) that the nine or ten licensees of Strandex technology for WPC production produced well over 100,000 tonnes of product in 2004. Barry Davis of Strandex Europe put the latest estimate at nearer 150,000. The licensees are mostly in the USA and Canada, but there are two in Japan and one in France.
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Freeze thaw not a problem after all Pessimists have suggested that undergoing several temperature cycles through zero Celsius might cause microcracking or other forms of damage in WPC. Dr Robert Tichy of Washington State University’s Wood Materials and Engineering Laboratory says no evidence has been found to confirm these fears. The modulus of rupture declined very slightly in the first few cycles but then more or less levelled off and continued to hold up for fifty three-day cycles, carried out in accordance with ASTM D7032. Tichy also says that termites are “not interested” in WPC.
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Any colour so long as it’s brown It was announced at the Bordeaux WPC meeting in March that Ply-Pak (Pty) Ltd has pioneered new pigmentation systems for WPC, which appear capable of withstanding the harsh South African climate (harsh for wood, that is) and demonstrate relatively good colour fastness. The colour has to be an “earth colour”, such as yellow, green or brown, but these are obvious colours for many WPC products anyway, rather than blue or pink. Colour retention is not yet guaranteed, but fading of dark brown WPC over the first nine months is minimal, and the human eye only detects it when making a comparison with new samples. Both the fibres and the resin are pigmented.
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Hackwell sees need for big application, big players and a close check on quality Geoff Pritchard of the Hackwell Group told the Bordeaux meeting on WPC in March 2005 that the European WPC industry, which currently sells about 100,000 tonnes a year including vehicle parts, still suffered from the lack of a single big application like decking, which would quickly transform the European industry’s economics. The USA is developing second generation WPC materials with improved properties, leading to new applications, but the cost of doing this, i.e. imparting polymer orientation and strengthening formulations, could raise European prices too much. In practice it seems likely that decking, cladding and window products, together with interior construction components, will continue to provide the majority of non-auutomotive sales in Europe in the short term. If one or two much bigger players were to enter the European market, they might bring sufficient investment to publicise WPC more effectively, which would benefit the industry as a whole.
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WPC Conference in Bordeaux Following a successful event two years ago CTBA (Centre Technique du Bois et de l'Ameublement - France) organised its second conference devoted to WPC in Bordeaux (France) on March 24 & 25, 2005 . At this event a speaker from Luzenac, the talc producer, argued that talc has many advantages in WPC formulations. Geoff Pritchard of the Hackwell Group presented a paper entitled "The Market for Wood Plastics Composites in Europe".
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WPC and Mineral Fillers Brian Hackwell of the Hackwell Group, publishers of market reports on the European wood plastics industry, presented an overview of wood plastics composites (WPC) at RAPRA's (Rubber & Plastics Research Association) conference on High Performance Fillers Cologne, Germany, on March 8 and 9, 2005 (see http://www.polymerconferences.com for details). The conference covered a wide range of fillers for polymers. Although many of these are mineral, wood qualifies as a "high performance" filler on account of the excellent workability and aesthetics it brings to wood plastic composites. Seen from the other side, polymers provide a high-performance matrix for wood fibres in some applications, as the combination has much lower water absorption and higher durability than traditional timber when used outdoors. Wood and mineral fillers do not need to be seen as alternative or competing materials: mineral fillers are now being used along with wood in some WPC formulations.
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Life Cycle Assessment of Wood Plastics Composites Wood Plastics Composites are said to be "green" materials and environmentally friendly. But how do they compare with ordinary timber? Mr Rak-Hee Hwang, a postgraduate student at Imperial College, London, has attempted to compare them by carrying out a Life Cycle Assessment, with assistance from Strandex Europe. He took decking as a typical application. The conclusions were that WPC has a greater environmental impact than wood, and more so when recycled plastics are used to make it instead of virgin plastics. However, the question of how to identify the beginning of the production process is a difficult one, and in this case the energy needed to make the HDPE bottles that were subsequently recycled to make the WPC was counted towards the latter's environmental impact. The best way to dispose of WPC after use appeared to be incineration with energy recovery.
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UK Government gives a lift to environmental technologies The UK’s Environmental Industries Unit (EIU (a joint DTI/DEFRA Unit)) is working with an industry-led advisory group to look for ways in which to encourage innovation in the environmental industries. EIU and the Advisory Group will be working with a broad range of stakeholders to address some of the barriers that prevent environmental technologies getting to market. Areas of interest include:
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UK construction industry explores WPC
The UK construction industry is just beginning to learn about wood plastics composites. A first seminar was held in Dundee, Scotland in January 2004, with the forestry industry as the target audience. The programme was repeated, with a few modifications, on 18 October in Watford, southern England for a very different audience. About 130 people in total attended the two meetings. The WPC manufacturers Knotwood, who use post-consumer HDPE bottles, and Vannplastic, distributors of Ecodek decking, gave presentations after stimulating over-views by Robin Kent of Tangram Technology and Sue Halliwell of BRE. Geoff Pritchard of Hackwell Group spoke on applications and properties, and the green credentials of wood plastics composites were examined by Richard Murphy of Imperial College. There were several small table-top displays, mostly of WPC samples. Unofficial comments on the state of business so far were mixed, some being upbeat and some less so. The prevailing view was that while the WPC industry is not yet ready to take on the window frame market, there are plenty of other opportunities. For those wanting to know more about how to get certification for WPC products, the talk by Richard Zammitt of BRE Certification (a separate company from BRE) was of keen interest. Bill Corry of Impact Asset Management Ltd spoke about the Recycling Fund. The view was expressed that the WPC industry needs to concentrate more on what the customer wants---competitive prices---rather than draw attention to the environmental virtues of the products, which although appreciated, would not usually clinch a decision.
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Lubricant manufacturers attracted to WPC There is evidence of considerable interest among leading manufacturers of lubricants in the possible development of a European WPC business. It has been noted that over 20,000 tonnes of lubricant are already sold each year to the US wood plastics composites industry. Advantages of lubricants in WPC extrusion include improved flow despite difficult mixes, lower operating temperatures, higher throughputs, all of which allows more competitive prices to be achieved together with better material properties.
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Entek claims nearly 4 tonnes an hour Steve Jones of Entek claims that his company's extrusion equipment can now achieve high output rates of nearly 4 tonnes an hour when processing wood and natural fibre composites. Entek can also produce high L:D (64:1) machines for reactive processing of thermoplastic film scrap. Speaking in Amsterdam at Addcon World, the plastics additives conference organised by Rapra Technology, Jones also highlighted the huge supply of MDF scrap that many MDF companies generate; in one case, he said, a company produced 400,000 tonnes a month. This could be used in wood plastics composite manufacture if traces of residual monomer could be removed or tolerated. Harald Zodl of Fasalex also spoke at Addcon on the indoor applications of his company's starch based wood composites. Despite having only 8 employees, Fasalex expects its 2004 turnover to be around 1.3M euro, based on a production capacity of 4000 tonnes a year. Lonza's table top display featured lubricants for WPC.
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New compatibiliser for wood-polyethylene composites
The mechanical properties of wood plastics composites are generally inferior to those of wood, especially where strength is concerned. A compatibiliser is a chemical designed to improve the bonding between the polar wood fibres and the non-polar polyolefin resin. These chemicals are often expensive, but they improve the mechanical properties very considerably. Workers at Oregon University in the US have reported a new type of compatibiliser for wood-polyethylene composites. It consists of a polyaminoamide/epichlorhydrin adduct together with stearic acid or anhydride. This treatment increased the modulus of elasticity measured in tests by 40%. See Y Geng et al, Journal of Applied Science, Volume, 91, Issue 6, 15 March 2004, 3667
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More producers looking at WPC The Hackwell Group reports that more companies are looking at production of wood plastic composites, although most of the current participants are small. A year ago there were estimated to be fewer than 25 manufacturers in Europe, but there are now considered to be over 30. One of the most important considerations for the future growth of this infant industry is whether the American passion for decking will spread to Europe: decking is an ideal WPC application and a major contributor to the economic success of the US wood plastics market. Speaking at the Dundee meeting mentioned above, Steve Jones of Entek, the US extruder equipment company, predicted that Europeans would soon become enthusiastic about decking. Certainly British television programmes have highlighted the product in the UK intensively and this has led to a big increase in sales, although with WPC having such a small presence, timber decking is the beneficiary of current growth.
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Progress with rotational moulding
Extrusion is the most popular technique used for fabricating finished products from wood plastics composites, although injection moulding is also being developed. Another process worth considering in the future is rotational moulding to produce large hollow objects. Technical hurdles will need to be overcome: experiments with the rotational moulding of natural fibre composites have shown that defects form relatively easily, for example bubbles caused by poor consolidation or by the hydrophilic nature of the fibres. Natural fibres can also degrade to some extent in the process. Surface treatment of the fibres is recommended. |