MOSCOW (MRC) -- Penoplex, Russia's largest producer of extruded polystyrene foam, began resuming its general purpose polystyrene (GPPS) production at the Kirishi plant on 13 September, the company's sources told MRC on Friday.
They said the company would completely restart production on 14 September and Penoplex would use the first produced lots of XPS boards for the needs of its own production.
This plant with a capacity of 50,000 tonnes of GPPS per year was shut for maintenance on 5 August 2019 and was supposed to return to operation on schedule - on 5 September, according to ICIS-MRC Price report. However, the company was forced to postpone the restart of production due to the lack of feedstock - styrene monomer (SM).
As reported earlier, the first lots of feedstock had already begun to arrive at the plant in the first week of September, therefore, an approximate deadline for launching the Kirishi plant's polystyrene (PS) production was then scheduled for September 15-18.
As also reported previously, there was an acute shortage of material, including GPPS, in the Russian PS market in late August, which was partially caused by the outage at the Kirishi plant.
Penoplex is a large Russian producer of polymer-based building and decorative materials. The company began its activity in 1998 with the launch of Russia's first line for the production of heat-insulating materials from extruded polystyrene foam under the PENOPLEX trademark. The company has eight production sites, seven of which are located in Russia and one - in the Republic of Kazakhstan (Almaty region), with a total production capacity of 4 million cubic metres.
MRC