China got its first metallocene polyethylene producer, recently, at Shenyang Chemical, which will greatly improve crop production, through improved light absorption, while bringing down film production costs and the product can be used for food packaging and other wrapping.
Metallocene polyethylene is a top polyethylene resin that can increase agricultural plastic film strength, tear resistance, and translucency and is leak-proof. But, experts say that producing it involves strict raw material and technical demands and only a few foreign chemical giants, such as Exxon Mobil, Dow Chemical, and LG, could produce it before. And it usually came with a high cost, so China’s film producers, who depended on imports, incurred great costs. Now, this new product fills a domestic polyethylene production void for the domestic market.
The 30,000-ton-per-year unit at Shenyang Chemical uses technology from a US company, which is also a technology supplier for Exxon Mobil. The unit is now putting out qualified products after a year of testing. Shenyang Chemical’s products have been proven to be on a par with those made by Exxon Mobil and it has four high-performance series, with good meltability and which can lower the technical conditions required of downstream film producers.
Shenyang Chemical is a subsidiary of ChemChina’s Bluestar and a State listed company in chlor-alkali products, petroleum deep-processing and new chemical materials. Its product line covers caustic soda, PVC paste resin, acrylic acid and acrylate, epoxy propane and polyether. Thanks to its innovation, it built the world’s first ethylene industrialization unit using the catalytic pyrolysis process.