Future notable resins may be few and far between

A number of Notable Materials are no longer with us. Their demise is tied to corporate indifference and lack of demand, but certainly many were victims of their inability to generate fast profits.

Shell pulled its Carilon aliphatic polyketones from the market when it failed to find a buyer for the operation. Dow dropped its Blox thermoplastic in 2002, a resin that offered the adhesion and durability of epoxy with the flexibility and processability of thermoplastics. Gone too are Dow''s much touted Questra syndiotactic polystyrene, Index ethylene-styrene interpolymers, and polycyclohexylethylene (PCHE), which was seen as a polycarbonate competitor. Basell ended production of Hivalloy polypropylene alloys.

Walter Robb, retired senior VP of GE Plastics says, "In the future we won''t see new polymers developed. Management of companies has lost patience. New polymers can take up to a 10-year cycle to develop. Companies are not as willing to take the risk today."

Previous new polymer developments were often serendipitous. Take for example the discovery of the polyolefin isotactic polybutene-1 (PB-1). That development started on a warm Saturday afternoon in a lab in Milan when a research student at the Institute of Industrial Chemistry of Milan Polytechnic, working under the leadership of Giulio Natta, co-recipient (with Karl Zeigler) of the 1963 Nobel prize for catalytic polymerization, had time on his hands.

The then-23-year-old Giorgio Mazzanti decided to see if he could isolate a solid polymer using different monomers similar to those found a few weeks earlier for polymerizing propylene. Fifty years later in 2004, on the anniversary of commercialization of PB-1, Mazzanti said, "I decided to try other monomers because conventional wisdom said it couldn''t be done. The polymer I isolated was actually [only] a small part of the much bigger story of research on the stereo-specific polymerization of alpha-olefins."

But times like these appear to be gone. "The glory days of polyolefins are over. Quantum leaps in technology today are unlikely," says Hans-Robert Schmidt, senior VP. Basell Deutschland, (Wesseling, Germany). He expects future development to revolve around refining and perfecting existing products.

"Look, [Basell''s] Hostalen is a 50-year-old technology to produce high-density polyethylene, yet there is still a lot of growth in producing new grades with different features within the know-how," he says.

William Reay, marketing director of EVOH producer EVAL Europe (Zwijndrecht. Belgium) is optimistic that we will see new resins in the future, "but I wonder if they will be from the big players. They tend to want to see successful commercialization within two to three years and that just isn''t possible."

Reay says future development will probably come from small producers who are willing to take risks. Big players that don''t see a quick return on investment will probably slim down their portfolios by closing down or selling off such divisions.

A number of recent resin developments have been sold off to former employees who saw a future in those materials. Last year Dow off-loaded its engineering thermoplastics polyurethane-matrix composite, Fulcrum, a pultrusion material which offers recyclability and no volatile organic compounds emissions to a new company, Fulcrum Composites (Midland, MI), headed by ex-Dow business manager for Fulcrum technology, Chris Edwards.

And GE Plastics sold the patents to its cyclic PBT, PET, and PC technology to some former employees which formed a startup, Cyclics Corp (Schenectady, NY), that has since successfully brought the first cyclic butylene terephthalate (CBT) plant in Schwarzheide, Germany onstream.

"If you take our experience with CBT, the most challenging thing was to find financing to develop this," says John P. Ciovacco, Cyclics chairman. "I don''t expect many, if any, new polymers in the future. Today''s chemical companies want proof that a certain new material will sell before they go down that path."

Ciovacco says that management changes at many large firms make consistency in decision-making often impossible today. One management team will come up with something that looks like a breakthrough but next year''s people, being different, could easily reverse that decision in order to cut costs or orient the firm in a different direction. "The demand for orderly results to show your investors is not conducive to development of new plastics," he says.

Robert Colvin [email protected]

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