High EVA pricing may drive adoption of alternative materials

The booming solar encapsulant film market has prompted one Taiwanese supplier to cease manufacturing foam grades for footwear altogether and instead focus 1500 tonnes/month of its capacity on this application alone. The supplier in question, USI Corp. (Taipei) has now outsourced footwear grade production to sister company Asia Polymer Corp. (Taipei).
Solar grade prices have peaked at $3300 per tonne, according to Kevin Huang, Deputy Marketing Manager at USI. "But what's now driving overall EVA pricing are the foam and hot melt markets because moves such as ours mean less supply of such grades is available," he notes. Foam grades are reportedly currently pegged at $2850-$2900 per tonne CIF Ningbo, while hot melt grades have reached $3250.
Huang does feel the market for EVA sheet may have peaked, however, because sheet converters have over-invested in extrusion capacity in Japan, China and the U.S. just as some countries are starting to withdraw subsidies for solar panel insulation and a large inventory of unsold solar panels starts tp build.
To the rescue with alternative sources to EVA in the meantime is Dow Chemical (Midland, MI), which now offers grades of Engage and Infuse ethylene-propylene block copolymer that process like EVA and can be used as low-cost substitutes in foam applications. A blend of 20-30% Engage/70-80% EVA, for example, is said to give better compression set and resilience.
Dow is also seeing more LLDPE going into extrusion coating due to higher LDPE prices. Here, Dow offers grade Elite 5815 for blending with LDPE.
Dow has also developed an alternative material for solar encapsulation, with that reportedly also based on Engage. It is not the only supplier offering non-EVA materials for solar applications. Dai Nippon Printing (Tokyo) also has a polyolefin-based material that it is promoting.