February 2010 Archives

It's now possible to build a whole house from recycled waste plastic and minerals, according to this article spotted by Linda Naylor in today's Plastics & Rubber Weekly.

Construction of the affordable low carbon homes is from packaging and manufacturing waste, and each house consumes around 18 tonnes of waste material.

The technology has been developed by Affresol, and the first house has been ordered by Worcester Bosch, a manufacturer of heating and hot water systems, using plastic from the company's recycled boilers.

(photo: Affresol)

Andrea Camilleri's "The Shape of Water," set in the seedy but sunny corruption of Sicily, is a recent addition to the Blog's long defunct series of Chemical Book Reviews.

When I wrote here about how I was conned into paying full price for the third of the Stieg Larssen trilogy, and revealed myself to be a Wallander fan, my colleague Kristian Vieru was kind enough to recommend to me the writing s of Camilleri.  He is the author of a series of five books featuring a world-weary Sicilian detective called Salvo Montalbano, who solves cases and enjoys fine food.

Imagine my surprise on finding that the first murder takes place in an abandoned chemical factory called "Sicilchim," which the author's footnote explains as "shorthand for Sicilia Chimica, or Sicilian Chemicals."

More Blog Books:

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Aberystwyth Mon Amour

James Bond 

Empires of Oil

Nike said on Thursday that nine teams including Brazil, Netherlands and Portugal would be wearing shirts made from recycled polyester from a Taiwanese supplier.

Each shirt would use up to eight plastic bottles, according to this article in today's Times.

NPRA has announced on its website that the speaker at the International Petrochemical Luncheon will be Charles "Charlie" Gibson, Former ABC World News anchor and co-anchor of Good Morning America.

NPRA's International Petrochemical Conference is less than five weeks away, on 28-30 March 2010 at the Grand Hyatt hotel in San Antonio, Texas. The Luncheon marks the end of the conference on Tuesday 30 March.

Industry meetings have been arranged, flights booked, hotels booked, the NPRA website consulted for the meeting schedule.

On its website, NPRA says that:

"The conference attracts more than 2200 attendees in the petrochemical industry including planners, marketers, sales representatives, engineers and senior management. Approximately 600 companies are represented from 43 countries. At the 2009 conference more than 30% of the attendees were from outside the United States."

In addition to Charlie Gibson, the conference also has The Honorable William S. Cohen, Former U.S. Secretary of Defense, speaking in the General Session on Monday on The Perils and Promise of the New World.

First the policemen look young. Then the teachers look young. Then I notice that my female contemporaries at conferences are wearing low heels or even flats. Now I've started to see the attraction of theatre matinee performances.

Coming out of "Jerusalem" - a funny and powerful play which will be picking up all the awards - at 5pm on Saturday, still in daylight and with plenty of evening still ahead, the pleasure of the performance is compounded by the thought of an early night.

I see there are loads of joke websites with "You know you're getting old when ...." And more than a few of the gags would strike a familiar note among my colleagues.

At last week's Base Oils conference, we had bouncers on the door. They were real heavy duty bouncers to stop gatecrashers from getting in to the conference, or even in to the coffee area to network with the delegates. Now that's the mark of a successful conference, when you can afford to turn people away.

The ICIS Olefins Conference to be held at the Brussels Hilton on 3 March is now sold out, I hear from Nel on Friday. She emails me as I am coming out of the morning sessions at the World Base Oils Conference, which has also been a huge success, with a record attendance. As I said here last week (oops I am sounding like Paul Hodges here) it looks like we are all returning to business travel with alacrity.

(Click here for Top Story from World Base Oils Conference.)

While I was freezing in the snows of Amsterdam, our Houston ethanol team was enjoying the sunshine in Orlando, Florida, and sending back some spectacular video footage of the passions unleashed by the renewable fuels debate.

A customised email alert from ICIS news came through on my blackberry on the way home from Amsterdam on Tuesday night, and I was entranced to see a whole string of news videos from William L and Stephen B, particularly this one accompanying William's article: "US ethanol leader blames crude oil imports for war."

It sounds like the ICIS Base Oils Training in London on Monday got off to a flying start when trainer Amy Claxton's luggage went astray on her flight from snowbound Philadelphia. The flight itself had been pretty eventful with a body laid out in the plane during the journey. A further welcome to London was in store, when she was evacuated from the conference hotel in Lancaster Gate in what looked like a fire drill but turned out to be a real fire a few floors below her room.

Despite the fact that she had no luggage for the first day of "A Crash Course in Base Oils," Amy ploughed on with her all-day training programme, which had attracted a large number of people who were in London for IP Week and would be attending the bumper ICIS World Base Oils and Lubricants Conference later this week on 18-19 February 2010.

It seems that my tale of travelling for hours to visit an editorial contract at lunchtime and being greeted with nothing more than a cup of coffee has struck a nerve with others in the petchem industry.

One friend tells me that he went on a recent visit for top level legal discussions, and after a five-hour journey was rewarded with a glass of water.

Another friend had forwarded my tale to a colleague of hers, to commiserate with him because he had recently done the early morning journey to Holland to be met with a lunch of an apple.

What are we coming to? Where are the three-martini lunches? Sadly before my time.

The "Introduction to Petrochemicals" training on Monday sees a really eclectic bunch of petchem novices gathering in snowy Amsterdam - from rubber traders, to powertool packagers, to label manufacturers, to major chemical producers. And not just from the European petchem heartland, but from as far afield as South Africa, Syria and Abu Dhabi. Half the delegates are women, and two of them are in headscarves.

As I give my paper on the second day "Advanced" course, the snow is gently falling outside the window. Peter T throws himself into the training with gusto, dressing in head to toe polyester to bring his topic to life. I notice that his bag of props for the polymers training has become more space-saving over the years. We're now down to small pill bottles and assorted bagging, which can be packed up into a small space in his carry-on luggage.

See also PHOTOS: Amsterdam ICIS Training

Photos from ICIS Training days, Amsterdam, 15 and 16 February 2010.

1 Nigel writing hot ICIS news article on Yara buying Terra, 8.00 Monday morning.

2 and 3 Hard at work in the Monday afternoon workshop sessions.

4 Trainers Peter T and Alastair Hensman conferring before Tuesday morning session.

5 Snow on Tuesday morning, from hotel window.

6 Catching up with old friends.

ICIS news has been covering the snow in the US northeast and its impact on the petchem business, with articles such as "Chem traffic freezes as snow clogs roads in eastern US."

Industry folk have mostly just taken it in their stride, delaying trips or working from home. Now a US colleague has sent this link to a US weather forecast video from the DC/Baltimore area, where the weatherman is more than a little excited by the snow ... 

A database of Shell's staff has found its way onto the internet, including personal details of 170,000 employees and contractors, according to an article in Saturday's Times.

Shell's security department is now investigating how the details were emailed to seven non-governmental organisations (NGOs) including Greenpeace, Justice in Nigeria Now and Friends of the Earth.

Since the Blog has only this week had full training in data protection, it is well aware that under UK law, companies have a legal obligation to keep employees' data secure.

Competitors in Vancouver's Winter Olympics have been displaying state of the art goggles which show speed, timings and store data for future analysis. The lightweight plastic Transcend goggles "can save a full day's ski or snowboard runs into PC software that plots route and performance information through every twist, turn or slalom gate," according to this article.

The pace of innovation in the world of eyewear continues apace, with further advances slated for later in 2010. The Kopin Golden-I is a head-mounted display which provides a two-way connection to your desktop PC "reading out emails and documents (and controlled) through voice recognition."

See also ICIS news article: Petrochemical advances set for display at Winter Olympics

Matt Damon stars in "The Informant!" - a film about a whistle-blower at an agricultural chemical firm in the early 90s, who discovers a price-fixing scam. He agrees to work as an undercover spy for the FBI, but apparently takes his new James Bond role a touch too seriously.

The Blog hasn't seen this film and quite honestly doubts that it will bother, unless it is on a very long flight and has seen everything else on offer. It's irritating enough to have the exclamation mark in the title, but the photo of a fatted-up Damon with glasses and moustache suggests that the level of humour is going to be pretty basic.

I've just seen that thousands of readers have downloaded my fellow blogger Paul Hodges' white paper Budgeting for a New Normal. This triumph has brought in a lot of new readers to the ICIS blogs, and I congratulate Paul on his success. Click through to his blog to download it free.

If ever there was a place to declare "Recession, what recession?" it's London's West End on a Saturday night.

In Covent Garden, every restaurant is packed. Pub windows disclose drinkers squeezed in like on the rush hour underground. I walk past one pub, the Porterhouse, where people are queuing to get into the cordoned-off pavement area at the front of the pub, at six in the evening.

By the time I come out of the Vaudeville Theatre where Marcus Brigstocke is playing, all the theatres are kicking out and it's bedlam, with crowds of blondes in evening dress piling out of Dirty Dancing and trying to hail cabs. Families are pouring out of The Lion King onto the Strand, and even the bike rickshaw taxis are picking up trade.

But the most surprising counter-recessionary sight of all for me is that the theatre ushers who usually sell icecream tubs in the intervals, are selling half-bottles of champagne from chiller trays round their necks.

Listening to a colleague making a presentation to a group of non-native English speakers recently, I pondered on how we use metaphors to an extent which must be impenetrable for anyone with a limited grasp of business English.

In a few minutes of his presentation I jotted down:

·                       The gold standard

·                       Off the side of a desk

·                       Pave the road in front of us

·                       Show a bit of leg

How lucky we Brits are that English is the international language of the petchem industry.

I've just spent a couple of days in the ICIS Heren office in Holborn, and was very impressed to see a supreme example of Olde English bus queuing at the bus stop outside Waterloo station on both days.

In most parts of London, queuing at bus stops is a ramshackle affair, but the dual queue at the 521 bus stop for the seven-minute journey from Waterloo to Holborn, is a queue par excellence. Two parallel lines of smartly dressed City folk stand in the exact position for the two doors of the 521 "bendy" bus.

I didn't capture this on camera, but now I see that there is a whole website devoted to tracking the trials and tribulations of London's bus commuters (Boriswatch), and these perfect queues have been captured by one Tom in his posting: "A Week on the 521."

Oil will peak at $150-200/barrel in the next five years, said John Miles, global leader for energy resources and industry at consulting engineers Arup, on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning.

Representing the findings of a group of business leaders calling for urgent action to prepare the UK for peak oil, he claimed that demand from the developing world would drive crude oil prices to these levels, and that supply would be constrained by the rate of extraction.

"There will a structural shift upwards in the price of oil in ... the next five years, and steps need to be taken to protect the weaker elements of society from the huge price rises," he said.

Click here to hear his interview

Does anyone really keep the contact details of all their business partners in a pile of business cards? Can there be anyone left in our great metropolises who has not seen an iPhone? Yes there can and it is our own low-tech blogger, John Richardson, who proudly lays claim to his Grumpy Old Man status in his guest column in this week's ICIS Chemical Business (page 7, From Our Own Correspondent).

Marvel at the state-of-the-art wizardry of the page-turning digital magazine, as you gasp at his sheer cussedness, sympathising with chemical traders for the hard life they lead and spurning their hi-tech gadgetry.

Says Antonella Harrison, managing editor of "The Market": "Rebecca Clarke and I highly raised the profile of ICIS by joining in a local Egyptian dance, the Tanura, on the final evening of the AFA 16th Annual conference... And bear in mind there was no alcohol served at the dinner!"

With the pineapple import season in full swing in the UK, and central American pineapples everywhere on special offer (two for £2), you can dazzle your guests with this crazy pineapple coring gadget which produces a spiral of perfect pineapple without the outer spikes and the fibrous core.

I didn't know such a thing existed, so of course didn't know that I wanted one, but now it is the favourite plastic gadget in the Blog kitchen. Hours of harmless fun are in store before it is consigned to the back of the gadget cupboard along with the yoghurt maker (also plastic), the insulated mugs (plastic with chemical company logos) and redundant ashtrays.

At the Shell building at Waterloo yesterday, I saw that the lobby facing the river was adorned with murals of red Ferraris.

Going on to the Shell website now, I see that the company describes its "Circuit" advert as a contender for one of the greatest motoring adverts of all time. It is a celebration of "the shared passion for performance that Shell and Ferrari have experienced together over the past 60 years."

Petrochemical folk who are regular EPCA-goers will recognise the final shots outside the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo.

Stephen Burns at ICIS Houston has got round to pulling some APLA 2009 scenes of Mexico City together. I particularly enjoyed the homemade stretch VW Bug, and the street scenes took me back to a distant IFA fertilizer conference in Mexico City, the memories of which are now a blur of huevos rancheros, smog and silver and turquoise earrings.

The great background music is Antonio Banderas singing a song from a 1995 movie called Desperado, according to Mr Burns.

The ICIS blogs managed to avoid total shame and humiliation this week when they were not included in a Times article highlighting the very worst of management blogs.

Quoting from some utterly cringe worthy recent postings, Sathnam Sanghera in the "Business Life" column singled out for ridicule such gems as:

• One writer who uses the phrase "three ahas" when he means "three conclusions."
• Another management blogger "drawing a parallel between playing jazz and implementing a small ERP system."
• A truly inane posting on "How to Avoid Wearing White Socks on TV."
• And another ghastly writer who writes "a 666-word essay advising people on how to have a coffee with a colleague."

How their cheeks must be burning, and what a narrow escape for us.

I see that Larry Tan has joined the ICIS team in Singapore as our Data & Analytics Manager-Asia. He was formerly with ExxonMobil, CMAI, Integra, a biodiesel start-up and consulting.

He will drive the expansion of our reporting portfolio in Asia and help drive product development in other regions, according to the announcement today.