Avery Dennison CleanFlake portfolio wins FINAT Recycling & Sustainability award 2019

MOSCOW (MRC) -- An innovation from Avery Dennison that enables closed-loop PET recycling has won this year’s FINAT Recycling and Sustainability award, as per the company's press release.

The CleanFlake portfolio (video) enables production of high quality recycled PET (rPET) from post-consumer bottles while maintaining all-important visual impact and food contact approval. The portfolio is further reducing environmental impact by using recycled PET liner material.

Jeroen Diderich, vice president and general manager EMEA, said that the award is a great recognition of Avery Dennison's continued focus on sustainable innovation: "FINAT is an important organisation representing our customer base and we are delighted with this win. CleanFlake technology is one example of the many initiatives we are introducing to reduce material use and waste. Generating clean PET flakes, free of label and ink contamination, is a difficult task for recyclers. We worked to develop a label that would separate from bottles completely in a conventional recycling facility, and CleanFlake can close the loop - generating high quality rPET suitable for making new PET bottles or other food packaging."

The portfolio meets many application needs, with a clear ‘no label look’ rigid facestock, a cavitated white version, and flexible facestocks that can adapt to semi-squeezable containers or dimensional changes in freshly blown bottles, eliminating or significantly reducing label wrinkle defects.

Jenny Wassenaar, sustainability and compliance director, said that the environmental benefits are substantial, including the sustainability gains available from the option of a rPET23 liner which contains 30% post-consumer waste: "Our analysis shows that using a million square metres of rPET23 reduces fossil fuel use by 30% (60 barrels of oil), energy use by 23% (equivalent to 17 households for a year) and water by 20% (123 people’s annual consumption)."

Extensive collaboration has ensured that the portfolio meets widely varying recycling standards in many countries. CleanFlake adheres to EPBP design guidelines and delivers 100% wash-off when following the in Petcore PET tray recycling protocol. It is also approved by Returpack (Sweden) and Infinitum (Norway).

Jenny Wassenaar said that such widespread testing is important: "A recycling washer can operate at anything from 65 to 85 degrees, and CleanFlake performs well either way. This initiative has shown how much can be achieved when manufacturers, suppliers, recyclers and converters all work together on sustainability improvements."

As MRC informed before, thhe recent launch, by Avery Dennison, of a portfolio using recycled PET (rPET) liners has received another important boost, with four labelling constructions available across Europe since February, 2019.

Headquartered in Glendale, California, Avery Dennison is a global leader in labeling and packaging materials and solutions. The company’s applications and technologies are an integral part of products used in every major market and industry. With operations in more than 50 countries and more than 25,000 employees worldwide, Avery Dennison serves customers with insights and innovations that help make brands more inspiring and the world more intelligent.
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Sasol secures USD1.8bn for Lake Charles project

MOSCOW (MRC) -- JSE-listed petrochemicals company Sasol announced on Friday that its subsidiary Sasol Financing USA had entered into new US dollar-denominated senior unsecured credit facilities, comprising a USD1.6-billion term loan facility and a USD150-million revolving credit facility, as per Orazio.

The facilities have a tenor of five years and will be used to refinance the outstanding Lake Charles Chemical Project asset finance loan.

As MRC reported previously, in July 2018, Honeywell announced that Secunda Synfuels Operations, an operating division of Sasol South Africa Ltd., would use a Honeywell Connected Plant service to monitor the operating reliability of its two Honeywell UOP CCR Platforming units at its refinery in Secunda, South Africa.
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IRPC EurAsia 19 concludes with tours of Neste, NAPCON and Borealis facilities

MOSCOW (MRC) -- Hydrocarbon Processing’s International Refining and Petrochemical Conference (IRPC) EurAsia concluded on Friday in Helsinki, Finland with a tour of Neste Corporation’s Kilpilahti refinery, NAPCON’s training simulator room and Borealis' facility and their combined-heat-and-power plant, said Hydrocarbonprocessing.

Surrounded by pine and birch trees on the Neste campus, Marko Pekkola, Vice President of Production, presented Neste’s priorities including driving innovations and efficiencies and scaling up faster and bolder. He shared Neste’s concrete goals of reaching over 1 Mtpy of liquified waste plastic as a refinery feedstock and another 1 Mtpy of other low-carbon feeds by 2030.

Petri Lehmus, Vice President of Research and Development introduced Neste’s waste plastics utilization project and suggested that the “need to innovate circular solutions where carbon is reused again and again” will be the vehicle for Neste’s growth.

Before heading out to see the largest refinery in Scandinavia, with production lines that include renewable diesel and a modern SDA production line to utilize bottom oil, Salla Roni-Poranen, Managing Director of Borealis Polymers OY, introduced their fully integrated petrochemical complex comprising six plants with a polyolefin production capacity of 600 thousand tons. She informed us of their plans for a carbon neutral future and presented their goal of having half of their electricity come from renewable sources along with a 20% improvement of energy efficiency by 2030.

In addition to seeing these facilities on a beautiful Finnish summer day, attendees were treated to a visit of NAPCON’s operator training simulator room and a demonstration of their production optimization solutions.
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Asian naphtha profit margins hit lowest in more than a decade

MOSCOW (MRC) -- Profit margins for making petroleum feedstock naphtha have hit their weakest in over a decade in Asia and a seven-year low in Europe as the global economy weakens and large-scale processing unit outages hurt demand, reported Reuters.

The benchmark naphtha margin NAF-SIN-CRK last week closed at a USD15.38 a tonne discount to Brent crude, the lowest since December 2008, when the financial crisis roiled the global economy.

The 124% slide in profit margins from March’s 2019 peak means naphtha - used chiefly as a dilutant in crude oil refining, as well as in products like varnishes and cleaning products - has the worst-performing margin of all oil products.

In Europe, northwest European naphtha cracks hit their lowest since June 2012 on Thursday at around - USD15.41 a barrel.

Benchmark European gasoline margins sank below USD5 a barrel on Thursday to their lowest since March this year. The fall in gasoline weighed further on naphtha, which is used as a blending component in the motor fuel.

South Korea’s LG Chem does not expect to restart its 1.3 million tonne per year (tpy) naphtha cracker until next week, after closing it last week following technical trouble.

Scheduled maintenance is also ongoing at a raft of processing units, or crackers, in North Asia, while Hanwha Total’s Daesan cracker in South Korea is also shuttered following a turnaround that started in late March.

A planned turnaround at Royal Dutch Shell’s Moerdijk petrochemical plant in the Netherlands was also contributing to lower naphtha demand in Europe.

One naphtha trader, asked for the reason behind the weakness in naphtha cracks globally, said: "Demand, demand, demand - and peak cracker turnarounds are not helping".

He said the sell-off in naphtha prices had been brewing for a couple of months.

"The naphtha market is very weak at the moment," said Matthew Chew, principal oil analyst at IHS Markit.

Chew said a plunge in prices for liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), a competing feedstock fuel, was also putting downward pressure on naphtha.

"The recent weakness in LPG prices has heavily influenced the preference for naphtha in the last five weeks," Hui Heng Tan of brokerage Marex Spectron said.

Not all oil companies active in the downstream sector are set to suffer. Refiners of oil products who also have petrochemical plants have a natural hedge in times of low naphtha prices.

OMV’s Chief Executive Rainer Seele told Reuters recently that he was ebullient about a market awash with cheap naphtha because it would benefit OMV’s push into petrochemical markets, providing a natural hedge in its operations.

A weakening global economy, which has started to dent oil and fuel demand growth, is weighing on industry profits as well.

"Over the past week or so our economists have revised down their GDP growth outlook for the US, China, India and Brazil,” Barclays bank said on Monday in a note about the economy and its impact on oil demand.

Those countries account for more than three-quarters of the British bank’s oil demand growth assumptions for this year, it said.

"The revisions imply a 300,000 barrel per day reduction in our current global oil demand outlook of 1.3 million barrels per day" for this year, Barclays said.

Falling margins in the petrochemical industry were also weighing on naphtha margins.

"The ethylene-naphtha spread is now around USD350 a tonne, about half of what it was some three months ago," said Sri Paravaikkarasu, director for Asia oil at energy consultancy FGE.

Ethylene is a building block for plastic and is the product most commonly made at most petrochemical facilities.
Paravaikkarasu said naphtha cracks should receive some relief from the full return of crackers from maintenance later in the northern hemisphere summer.

He added however: "The recovery path will be slow."
MRC

PET recycler Loop Industries gets USD35 million in backing from Canadian billionaire

MOSCOW (MRC) -- Quebec-based technology company Loop Industries is getting USD35 million in funding from a Toronto investment firm to help fund a recycling plant to produce tens of millions of pounds of RPET each year, said Canplastics.

The buyer of Loop’s stock, Northern Private Capital (NPC), is the exclusive investment vehicle of CFFI Ventures, a company wholly owned by billionaire entrepreneur John Risley. Risley made his fortune in the seafood and cable TV/internet provider businesses.

“Rarely in my long career have I come upon a company as well positioned to disrupt a giant market as Loop is today,” Risley said in a press release. “On top of that, we are proud to be playing a part in reducing plastic pollution in the world today.”

The RPET plant – which will be Loop’s first commercial recycling facility – is a project that’s part of the Montreal company’s joint venture with global virgin plastics producer Indorama Ventures Public Co. Ltd.

Loop owns patented and proprietary technology that depolymerizes low-value waste PET plastic and polyester fibre, including plastic bottles and packaging, carpet and polyester textile of any colour, transparency or condition and even ocean plastics that have been degraded by the sun and salt. Those monomers are then purified and repolymerized into PET.

After the purchase, NPC will have a 10.5% ownership stake in Loop. The transaction is expected to close by June 28 at the latest.

In January 2019, Loop Industries, Inc, a leading technology innovator in sustainably produced plastic, and ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions’ division, Uhde Inventa-Fischer GmbH, a leading global polyester technology provider and polyester plant engineering firm, entered into a strategic collaboration that would shape the future of PET and Polyester manufacturing.


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