Beleaguered workers from the Artenius site at Wilton, Teesside, are going to Spain in the hope of convincing parent company La Seda de Barcelona's shareholders that this site is worth saving.
The blog is not convinced: the Artenius PTA plant relied on Sabic's aromatics unit at Wilton for paraxylene feedstocks. This site closed at the end of 2008.
The downstream PET unit relies on ethylene glycol from a Dow plant which is also scheduled to close early next year. Where will these plants get their feedstocks from?
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paraxylene and ethylene glycol feedstocks are easily sourced on the open market, do not believe La Seda de Barcelona press release
ReplyDeleteWhen the going got tough at Wilton individual companies decided to bail out. Companies are falling like dominoes all around the site. The trouble started when ICI decided to pull out of a bulk chemicals market which it saw as too cyclical and sold individual units to corporations who went on to milk the site for a number of years. The site used to be fully integrated and contains some of the most highly skilled people I have ever worked with. Bad management at the new Sabic unit set this facility back a good while too. Now it seems it's once bitten twice shy and the biggest player on the site seems reluctant to sweep the chemical production gems from the floor. As for Artenius... treating a workforce in Spain like this would have produced a political tidal wave of biblical proportions... doing it in the UK has started to produce ripples, hopefully it's not too late.. (ex Wilton worker).
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