Indorama PTA expansion to be completed in Rotterdam

Indorama is expanding its PTA factory in Rotterdam's Europoort. With its new RTO unit (Regenerative Thermal Oxidiser), the capacity of the PTA factory will grow from 350 to 600 kilotonnes per year. The factory expansion is expected to be completed after the summer. Contractor Bilfinger reported in its in-house magazine, however, that the new RTO unit will be put to use earlier.

The RTO unit applies the latest exhaust-gas processing technology, in which the concentration of pollutants released to the air is reduced to an absolute minimum. Last autumn, during the construction of the new unit, there was also a maintenance shut-down at Indorama.

PET expansion

It was announced in November that the company was looking into PET recycling. In cooperation with the young, high-tech chemical company Ioniqa, a new technology was developed for this process, using biochemical recycling to dissolve PET from waste products and break it down into a colourless base molecule.

At the end of 2012, Indorama put into operation a completely dismantled and rebuilt PET production line in the Europoort. This line, from Offenbach, Germany, almost doubled the site's PET production capacity, from 200,000 tonnes to 390,000 tonnes per year. Indorama bought the Europoort site from Eastman in 2008.

Source: Port of Rotterdam