Recently in chemicals Category

Watching CNN for the morning news last week, while the Blog was in Budapest for ICIS training, there were continual adverts running on both mornings for DuPont. Most striking was this advert for the company's solar technology, which is helping to power a sustainable city at Masdar in Abu Dhabi.

At the Cannes G20 Summit on 3-4 November, the heads of state are stepping out on a rich "red carpet" of asphalt, coloured by iron oxide pigments from Lanxess, according to a company press release today.

The city of Cannes has renewed 9,400 square meters of walkways and squares around the Palais des Festivals congress centre for the event. The old asphalt is being removed and recycled.

One industry observer commented that it was good to see a chemical company making money from the collapsing global financial system.

South Africa's Blombos Cave has revealed early paint and adhesive production, according to a report published on Thursday in the journal Science and picked up by the New York Times.

Cavemen used stones to pound and grind earth containing a kind of iron oxide to a powder, known as ochre. This was then blended with fat from animal bone marrow and charcoal, to create paint for human adornment and cave painting.

The Cave, 200 miles east of Capetown on a coastal cliff, dates back to 100,000 years ago, according to archaeologists.

Those of us with a passing interest in hydrocarbons might be interested in this little animation on the New Scientist website: "The sound of hydrogen."

It is one of a series of one-minute animated films explaining basic scientific concepts, which I was lured into this morning by the tempting title "One-Minute Physics - How do we know our world is 3-D?"

(PS If the unavailable message is showing, see the video via this link to New Scientist TV.)

New Scientist is part of RBI, parent company of ICIS.

Dow will make the fabric wrap to go around the Olympic Stadium in east London, according to this BBC article spotted by Nigel.

The wrap was originally to be the finishing touch to the stadium, but was dropped for cost reasons. Now Dow will fund the wrapper and will be allowed to advertise on the panels around the stadium until a month before the Olympics open in 2012.

The Blog and many of the ICIS editors have been lucky in the draw for Olympics tickets, but we are unlikely to be passing that way before the event. Any readers who spot the Dow wrapper are invited to send photos in to the Blog.

photo: BBC/Populous

It was a pretty good day yesterday. First there was a morning meeting with an aromatics major player with Truong followed by a pleasant lunch on the South Bank. Then over to the massive Base Oils Conference in Lancaster Gate, followed by an early dinner at the Saatchi Gallery and in the evening a Paul Carrack concert at Cadogan Hall.

He still has a great voice and every song was a belter - Eyes of Blue, Always Have Always Will, etc. There was even a spot of singalong and dancing during the encore.

Meanwhile 540 base oils delegates were out on the town in London.

A blue plaque celebrating the life and work of the Nobel prize-winning chemist Sir William Ramsay was unveiled in London's Notting Hill on Wednesday, as part of a series of events marking the International Year of Chemistry, I heard on Radio 4's Today programme as I drove to work in the morning.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams, writer of "Periodic Tales - The Curious Lives of the Elements," said:

"Chemistry has a brand problem. It's sort of trapped between physics, that's glamorous and, you know, cosmology and subatomic particles and mystery, and biology which is us and our bodies. And both of these things either fascinate us or matter. And chemistry's sort of the stuff under the kitchen sink. But the elements are all around us, and they produce all the beauty in the world, as well as all the nasty smells."

Click here to hear the radio article

Seeing a Baader-Meinhof terrorist entering court clutching a PET bottle, in a photo in today's Independent, reminded the Blog that carrying a plastic bottle around all day has one key advantage: protection from malicious poisoning.

No doubt Ms Verena Becker, formerly of the Red Army Faction (which started as the Baader-Meinhof gang), chose to carry her own water into the Stuttgart courtroom for reasons of self-protection rather than concerns about dehydration or tap water contamination.

Still, you'd have thought that an anti-capitalist guerrilla would have thought twice about publicly supporting the multinational mineral water and PET bottle industrial complex.

Paying for bottled water in a country where the tapwater is perfectly drinkable still makes the Blog grind its teeth in irritation. So for UK folk who insist on carrying water around in case they expire from dehydration while out on a stroll in our cool and rainy climate, there is good news that Volvic has launched what it claims is the UK's first recyclable bottle made partially from sugarcane waste.

The new bottles, rolling out in the UK in December 2010, will be made from 25% recycled plastics derived from used bottles and BioPET, a new plant-based plastic developed by brand owner Danone.

BioPET is made from PET and fermented and dehydrated sugarcane waste, which will produce bottles with 20% plant material content, according to this article.

The new ICIS Top 100 Chemical Companies listing is published today in ICB, and it's free at this link.

The Blog can reveal that the top three are: BASF, Dow, ExxonMobil.

"The ICIS Top 100 lists the major global chemical producers, ranked by sales for 2009. The Top 100 provides key financial data for the largest companies in the chemical industry. It lists a range of financial information from top line sales to bottom line profits for players whose products help drive manufacturing and the global economy.

The Top 100 list confirms that 2009 was a year of turmoil, but many companies have emerged from the downturn in solid shape."