news
PlasticsWorld attracts 2,000 followers on Twitter
Thanks go out to Irish injection moulding company Smallwares for becoming the 2,000th follower of the AMI Magazines’ Twitter feed, @PlasticsWorld. Based in
Castlebellingham in Ireland,
Smallwares has been manufacturing garment
hangers for the past 40 years and claims to be the only Irish producer to export its products worldwide. PlasticsWorld is the
Twitter feed for Compound- ing World and its sister magazines. It features breaking industry news, comments and useful links, plus announcements about AMI’s magazines, books and events for the global plastics industry. You can follow us for free at: ❙
www.twitter.com/plasticsworld
FRX selects Antwerp for fire retardant plastics
US-headquartered flame retardant polymers develop- ment company FRX Polymers is to build its first commercial- scale production plant on the Bayer site at Antwerp in Belgium. The company signed a long-
term lease agreement in March for 3,000m2
of space and says it will commence
construction of the new plant in August of this year. The company has not disclosed the capacity of the unit, which is expected to be operational by the final quarter of 2013. FRX Polymers has devel-
oped a range of environmen- tally-friendly flame retardant plastics based on polyphos- phonate homopolymers,
copolymers, and oligomers. The plastics are said to be tough, transparent and simple to process and are intended for use as flame retardant additives or plastics for applications in areas such as electrical and construction. “The selection of Bayer’s
Antwerp site is a strategic one for FRX,” said FRX CEO and president Marc Lebel. “Not only is the site equipped with state of the art infrastructure, but two key raw materials important for FRX are also produced by Bayer on this site.” Construction of the new
FRX has selected Bayer’s Antwerp site for commercial production of its fire retardant plastics
facility – and further develop- ment of FRX’s pilot polymer plant in Switzerland – will be part funded out of the US$26.7 million raised from the company’s latest round of financing. BASF Venture Capital contributed US$2.7 million to this total. ❙
www.frxpolymers.com
PTS improves mixing capability
UK-based polymer recycler Plastic Technology Services (PTS) has installed a new batch mixing system from Italian manufacturer Beccaria to speed up its production process.
The 20,000 litre mixer, which was installed by UK- based K-Tech Plastics, replaces a 6,000 kg capacity fountain blending system at the PTS plant at Dumfries in Scotland.
4 COMPOUNDING WORLD | April 2012 The new TV 20,000 unit
includes a floor-mounted hopper with a forced auger feed system capable of loading a 1,000kg container into the mixer in just three minutes. Once the mixing cycle is complete, the unit is unloaded into bags via a high level outlet that delivers to an automatic weighing station. Previously, each bag had to be weighed manually. “It used to take 15 to 20 minutes to fill a bag, which
then had to be taken to a second station for weighing. The new system will fill a bag in 2.5 to 3 minutes. This, combined with the increased batch size and elimination of the secondary weighing operation, has saved us in the region of 20 minutes of production time per tonne,” said Steve Rice, operations manager at PTS. ❙
www.beccaria.it ❙
www.ktechplastics.co.uk
www.compoundingworld.com
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