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Saint-Gobain Glass and VEKA Recycling forge partnership to improve glass recycling
Saint-Gobain Glass has forged a new partnership with VEKA Recycling that represents a major advancement in sustainable construction and post-consumer glass recycling in the U.K. fenestration industry. Saint-Gobain has also been bolstering its glass-recycling capabilities in the U.S. with projects…
Dow to sell interest in DowAksa composites joint venture for $125 million
Dow Inc. (Midland, Mich.) announced that it has signed a sale and purchase agreement to sell its 50% interest in DowAksa Advanced Composites Holdings BV (DowAksa) to Turkish chemicals firm Aksa Akrilik Kimya Sanayii A.Ş., a company of Akkök Holding.…
Molten-salt electrolysis process quickly scales up U.S. cobalt-refining capacity
A proprietary molten-salt electrolysis (MSE) process originally designed for battery manufacturing has now been re-optimized for North America’s first operational cobalt-refining plant. The DirectPlateTM MSE technology developed by Xerion Advanced Battery Corp. (Kettering, Ohio; www.xerionbattery.com; see Direct molten-salt electroplating cuts…
Advanced Mixing Technologies Enhance Process Efficiency
New mixing solutions lead to higher yields, while minimizing energy consumption and material waste Usually engineered for a specific application in the chemical process industries (CPI), mixing solutions have the potential to enhance the efficiency of any process, leading to…
Conversion of CO2 gas to graphene successfully demonstrated
The ability to economically produce large scales of graphene will help to enable many high-performance applications, from smart packaging materials and medical devices to safer gas storage. A new process demonstrated at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI; San Antonio, Tex.; www.swri.org)…
Direct synthesis of C2 hydrocarbons using photoelectrochemistry
Researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley, Calif. www.lbl.gov), along with a host of collaborators, have made progress on an artificial photosynthesis system that converts CO2 into ethane and ethylene using nanostructured copper and perovskite. In a recent publication…
Plant Watch: June 2025 Business News
Plant Watch Cariflex opens $355-million latex plant in Singapore May 15, 2025 — Cariflex Pte. Ltd. (Singapore; www.cariflex.com), a wholly owned subsidiary of DL Chemical Co., Ltd. (DL Chemical), inaugurated its new polyisoprene latex plant at Jurong Island, Singapore. With…
Generative and Agentic AI: Intelligent Manufacturing Evolves
As many chemical producers are developing and implementing comprehensive AI strategies, newer AI paradigms, such as generative and agentic platforms are set to transform the benefits AI can provide Due to the continuous generation of data and the complexity and…
Refining Intelligence: Transforming Operations with AI
When challenged by fragmented knowledge and time-intensive manual analysis, artificial intelligence helped to accelerate decision-making during operational events Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a futuristic concept in the chemical process industries (CPI) — it is a present-day driver of…
Facts At Your Fingertips: Genetic Engineering Tools in Industrial Microbiology
Industrial fermentation using bacteria, yeast and other microbes to produce specific products has the potential to reduce future dependence on fossil-fuel-derived chemicals. To further the economic viability of industrial fermentation processes, engineers have turned to genetic modification to stimulate production…