Business ropean chemical industry took special note of the problems facing the chemical industry in Spain, since it entered EEC last year. As he put it, "Europe will present a challenge for the Spanish industry to be more competitive/' Speaking as a representative of the host chemical industry federation, Lorenzo Gascon, president of Spanish textile company La Seda de Barcelona, said that the Spanish business community had feared "an invasion of industrial products" once it joined EEC. "Now that a year has passed since we joined . . . one can see that these fears were justified," he said. Trade has become liberalized, value-added taxes introduced, and customs tariffs lowered, all of which have produced an increase in community imports of 32% and an increase in exports to the community of only 6%. An upsurge in internal demand for chemicals of 9 to 10%, for example, was only partly met by domestic production, which increased only 5%. In fact, in 1986, Spanish chemical imports grew 24% while exports fell 8.3%, added Julio San Miguel, vice president of Expoquimica-87, the national trade fair. Chemicals were one of the more dramatic sectors to show import growth, Gascon said. For example, imports of fertilizers were up 219%, pharmaceuticals 152%, plastics for polymerization 52%, and condensate plastics 49%. "This trend of Spanish foreign trade with the community continues to worsen in 1987. Thus, in the first four months of 1987, our imports from EEC increased 48% with respect to the same period in 1986, reaching $8.77 billion. In this same period, our exports to the community increased only 12%, thereby producing a deficit of $1.75 billion in only four months," Gascon added. Even with all the problems facing the industry since its entry into EEC, however, the promise remains greater, said San Miguel. "If we bear in mind that the per capita consumption of chemical products in the Common Market is of the order of 34% higher than the Spanish per capita consumption, the possibilities for the community's chemical 18
June 15, 1987 C&EN
industry in Spain present positive prospects," he said. There remains, h o w e v e r , the "very real challenge facing Spain as the result of its membership—the need to carry out the structural changes that will make our production system competitive within the community," said Gascon. "This structural adjustment, this modernization, is inevitable since we cannot remain within Europe without becoming more European ourselves." Patricia Layman, London
Mobay opens two labs for polycarbonate push In an effort to capitalize on growth prospects for polycarbonate consumption in the years ahead, Mobay formally opened an optical media laboratory and an extrusion laboratory at its Pittsburgh headquarters earlier this month. The new labs emphasize rapid growth markets. The optical media lab will allow Mobay to better serve users of its Makrolon polycarbonate in compact disks for new state-ofthe-art audio equipment as well as disk applications for computer-readable optical data memory storage systems. The extrusion lab, equipped to process sheet, film, laminations, profiles, and multilayer products, is aimed primarily at giving polycarbonate a toehold in the packaging market, particularly for baby foods and juices and infant formulas. Present U.S. consumption of polycarbonate is 345 million lb a year, according to R. Jay Finch, vice president and general manager of the plastics and rubber division of Mobay. Consumption likely will pass the 500 million lb mark by 1995, says Finch. Mobay, a U.S. subsidiary of West Germany's Bayer, has an annual capacity of 160 million lb of polycarbonate. Although Finch declines to reveal capacity utilization at Mobay's U.S. resin plants, he says capacity is such that Mobay feels confident it can supply Far East demands for the resins over the long term from U.S. sources. This may indicate that polycarbonate uses have not grown so rapidly in the U.S. as Mobay and
its parent would like. Polycarbonate for users in Australia, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan previously had been shipped from Europe, where Bayer has a capacity of 200 million lb, soon to be expanded to 250 million lb with completion of a new plant in Antwerp. Mobay and Bayer have a vested interest in seeing polycarbonate use grow. The company holds the basic patents on the material dating back to work done in Leverkusen, West Germany, 30 years ago. Commercial production began in West Germany in 1958 and in the U.S. in 1960. But, as Finch points out, "Competition in the engineering plastics business has grown more and more i n t e n s e . " And he observes that "more than 200 engineering plastics have been announced in the past two years." However, Mobay is quick to point out polycarbonate's benefits: It has transparency values close to plate glass, is highly resistant to impact with Izod impact resistance of about 15 to 17 ft-lb per inch for a V8-inch specimen, has excellent dimensional stability, has a dialectric strength of 400 volts per mil for good electrical insulating properties, and withstands temperatures of 265 to 275 °F at 264-psi loading. Blends with other engineering resins such as PET add chemical resistance. Mobay says that polycarbonate is now second in volume among thermoplastics used in the U.S., surpassed only by nylon. Mobay's new extrusion laboratory, according to Gerard E. Reinert, director of technical marketing, "will have three-material, five-layer coextrusion capability, with plans to expand to five-material, sevenlayer capability." The new compact disk lab includes a Meiki 140-ton injection molding machine that can mold disks up to 8 inches in diameter, according to Mark W. Witman, Makrolon technical marketing manager. Other equipment in the dustfree laboratory includes a metalizing chamber to add a light-reflective coating to disks, a CD analyzer to measure block error rates, and other optical imaging devices. Marc Reisch, New York
