The US company Graham Packaging Co. (York, Pennsylvania / USA; www.thegc.com) is planning to close down an extrusion blow moulding plant in the Welsh city of Wrexham / UK in the second quarter of this year. The customers formerly supplied by the company have allegedly shifted to other European sites, which rendered the facility with a throughput rate of 10,000 t/y unprofitable. The facility belongs to a cluster of five European plants which Graham had taken over from CarnaudMetalbox in July 1998. Despite the closure, Graham Packaging is continuing on an expansion course: Over the last years, new facilities were opened up in Spain and Poland and one Belgian plant was extended. This year, another production site in France will come on stream.

In the meantime, Graham Packaging has been rating itself as the world´s largest producer of blow-moulded plastic containers. At the same time, its subsidiary Graham Recycling whose activities concentrate mainly on the US market, is claimed to be the world´s leading recycling company for HDPE bottles. Its list of customers mainly contains large producers of automotive oil, food or liquids. In the past fiscal year (30th September 2001), the company has had a turnover of about USD 900m, 60 sites and a workforce of 4,000 employees.

In 1998, the founder Donald C. Graham, sold the majority of the shares which then had a turnover volume of USD 530m to the New York investment bank Blackstone. With the Graham Partners ( www.grahampartners.com) holding however, he owns a yet larger minority share as well as the majority of the shares in the subsidiary Graham Machinery Group (Europe: Hesta Graham GmbH, D-70771 Leinfeld- Echterdingen; www.grahammachinerygroup.com) – see recent report in Plasteurope.com 21, 2001. With a distribution of its other shares, the Graham Group has a total turnover of approximately USD 1.4 bn.