In almost all regions of the world, new capacities for PET – in particular for packaging – are in planning or under construction. Many of the new facilities going up are in Asia and eastern Europe. Korea´s SK Chemicals Industries (www.skchemicals.com), part of the of SK Group, is building a 120,000 t/y plant in Poland in a joint venture with two partners including Polish chemical group Anwil (PL-87805 Wloctawek; www.anwil.com.pl). Start-up is planned for 2004. According to Anwil, SK will become the first Asian PET bottle chip producer to establish capacity in Europe, lifting output capability to more than 400,000 t/y. The Korean group´s decision to invest in Poland is believed to have been prompted by expected above-average European demand.

Italian PET producer Mossi & Ghisolfi (M&G, HQ: I-20090 Assago; www.mgpolymers.com) said recently that its Altamira project in Mexico is targeted to go onstream in Q1 2003. With a capacity of 275,000 t/y, this project is being billed as world´s largest PET packaging resin facility. The Italian company also recently started up the largest solid-state PET plant in the US. Located in the state of West Virginia, the unit is capable of producing 125,000 t/y. With the acquisition of Brazil´s Rhodia-ster (www.rhodia-ster.com.br), M&G will have annual production capacity of 1.2m t/y of PET resin and will become world´s second largest producer, behind Voridian (www.voridian.com).

In the United Arab Emirates, Intergulf Empol plans to build an 80-100,000 t/y plant for PET bottle-grade chip in Hamriya Free Trade Zone, 25 kilometres from Sharjah. The idea is to achieve vertical integration with the existing 400m preforms plant in Sharjah. When the plant starts up – possibly in 2004 – half its output could be expected to be used captively for preform production. The remainder would be exported to Asia, the US and to Europe.