HAZCHEM Alert: assessing health risks to your workers

WALTER INGLES | January 17, 2019 | 211 views

Trying to identify and assess how hazardous chemicals could impact the health of your workers can initially seem daunting, so we’ve put together a three-step method to get you started. This blog will help you prepare a chemical hazard profile to determine the potential exposure of your workers to hazardous substances. Use it as the base of a chemical risk assessment and a tool for flagging individual workgroups (or work areas) for chemical exposure testing and control measures.

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6sense’s Account Based Orchestration Platform helps revenue teams compete and win in the age of Account Based Buying by putting the power of AI, big data and machine learning behind every member of the B2B revenue team, empowering them to uncover anonymous buying behavior, prioritize fragmented data to focus on accounts in market, and engage resistant buying teams with personalized, omni-channel, multi-touch campaigns. 6sense helps revenue teams know everything they need to know about their buyers so they can easily do anything they need to do to generate more opportunities, increase deal size, get into opportunities sooner, compete and win more often.

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Chemical Technology

Southeast polyolefins demand growth could be negative again in 2021

Article | June 6, 2022

BEFORE the pandemic, GDP growth rates in the developing world were always higher than in developed economies.And because developing economies had much lower levels of petrochemicals consumption than their rich counterparts, it meant that the multiples over GDP were higher than in the rich word, where consumption was pretty much saturated. For instance, polyethylene (PE) demand in a developed country such as Germany might have grown at 0.3% times GDP whereas in Indonesia the growth could have been one or more times higher than the rate of growth in GDP.But as The Economist wrote in this 11 July article: “In 2021 the poorest countries, which are desperately short of vaccines, are forecast to grow more slowly than rich countries for only the third time in 25 years.” Might the multiples over GDP growth also be adversely affected in the developing world, trending lower than the historic norms? They will almost certainly remain higher than the rich countries. But here is the thing: as millions more people are pushed back into extreme poverty by the pandemic or are denied the opportunity to achieve middle-income status, I believe that developing-world multiples may well decline.Escaping extreme poverty means being able to, say, afford a whole bottle of shampoo for the first time rather than a single-serve sachet, thereby raising per capita polymers consumption.

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Chemical Technology

Global polyethylene demand boom likely, increasing the sustainability challenge

Article | July 20, 2022

IT FEELS LIKE several lifetimes ago. If you recall, way back in November-December 2019 Asian variable cost integrated naphtha-based polyethylene (PE) margins turned negative because of the increase in US capacity. Then in January the following year, deep Asian and Middle East operating rate cuts returned some order to the market. Then, bang, as we all know, the pandemic arrived and turned everything on its head. The pandemic has, in my view, accentuated trends that were already well underway. I believe this means that the supply-driven downturn that started in late 2019 will not return.Long before coronavirus upended everyone’s lives, PE demand was becoming increasingly divorced from GDP growth because of the shifting nature of end-use demand. Booming internet sales was, I believe, a major factor behind the split between the growth of the overall economies in the developed world plus China and PE demand.The average product bought online is dropped 17 times because of the large number of people involved in the logistics chain, according to Forbes. This had led to a surge in demand for protective packaging made not from PE and other polymers such as polypropylene, expandable polystyrene and PET films (I will look at their demand growth prospects in later posts).Despite sustainability pressures, the scale of demand for stuff bought online translated to a lot more consumption of virgin polymers.

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Chemical Technology

Key Trends in the Digital Transformation of the Chemical Industry

Article | July 14, 2022

The chemical business is intricate, with numerous sub-sectors dealing with various challenges. Thus, there are some differences in the sector's main areas of digitalization. For instance, while specialty chemicals with smaller batches but larger profit margins are concerned with improving quality, large factories are concentrated on accelerating throughput speed. To be able to react to quick and repeated changes in demand, supply, and working circumstances, however, every plant must optimize output, reduce waste, improve safety and sustainability, and become more nimble. Therefore, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and cloud computing are expected to be the three most popular applications for digital transformation during the coming two years. Key Trends Production Optimization The first and most valuable use cases of digitalization in chemical plants center on production optimization through improved equipment performance, process automation, remote and predictive monitoring, and simplified maintenance. Chemical factories, which often provide basic chemicals for use as end products in other sectors, have a special responsibility to maintain consistently high product quality. However, doing so can be challenging given the significant variations in raw material supply and quality. In addition, as process engineers can change the mix on the fly in reaction to fluctuations in quality, feedstock, or ambient temperatures, better data and analytics enable finer and more frequent adjustments. Lowering Waste The main advantage of digitally transformed plants so far has been cost reduction. The price volatility of raw materials is a problem for the chemical production sector because customers naturally want constant low prices. Minimizing waste is critical since facilities must contend with rising energy costs. Analytics tools that monitor fluctuating raw material prices aid factories in negotiating the best deals with suppliers and preparing in advance for price spikes. The risk of oversupply is reduced since plants can prepare the proper quantities of various products thanks to more precise demand predictions. Sustainability, Compliance, and Safety The chemical industry is heavily regulated as a result of the quantity of hazardous chemicals and the number of end-use industries that rely on it. Businesses are adopting digital transformation to boost safety awareness, reduce emissions and dangerous flare incidents, and guarantee a transparent and accurate audit trail. Plants that quickly adopt digital solutions for remote monitoring, supply chain visibility, waste reduction, production optimization, raising their safety profile, and opening up new opportunities will profit from higher profits and increased revenue, whereas those that hesitate for too long risk failing in the long run.

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Chemical Management

The pandemic, climate change, plastic waste and the great divide: the world in 2025

Article | June 13, 2021

NOBODY SHOULD be surprised that the developing world has fallen behind in the battle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as the region is a long way from recovering from the pandemic.Evidence to this effect emerged last week in comments made by Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA). “In many emerging and developing economies, emissions are heading upwards while clean energy investments are faltering, creating a dangerous fault line in global efforts to reach climate and sustainable energy goals,” said Birol. At the current rate, carbon dioxide emissions from developing countries largely in Asia, Africa and Latin America are set to increase by 5bn tonnes/year over the next two decades, according to the IEA, as access to power increases.At present, around 785m people worldwide have no access to electricity. There are also 2.6bn people without access to clean cooking options.

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Spotlight

6sense

6sense’s Account Based Orchestration Platform helps revenue teams compete and win in the age of Account Based Buying by putting the power of AI, big data and machine learning behind every member of the B2B revenue team, empowering them to uncover anonymous buying behavior, prioritize fragmented data to focus on accounts in market, and engage resistant buying teams with personalized, omni-channel, multi-touch campaigns. 6sense helps revenue teams know everything they need to know about their buyers so they can easily do anything they need to do to generate more opportunities, increase deal size, get into opportunities sooner, compete and win more often.

Related News

KEMIRA FORMS NEW JOINT VENTURE IN SOUTH KOREA

chemeng online | January 14, 2019

Kemira Oyj (Helsinki, Finland; www.kemira.com) has signed an agreement to establish a joint venture (JV) – Kemira Yongsan Chemicals Co. —in Ulsan, Republic of Korea, with Yongsan Chemicals, a privately-owned chemicals company in South Korea. Forming a joint venture in South Korea is an important step in expanding Kemira’s presence in Asia Pacific and driving profitable growth in the region. The new joint venture will produce dry polyacrylamide (DPAM), cationic monomer Q9 (AMD) and other chemicals, which are used for retention and drainage in packaging and paper production, as well as in wastewater treatment and in sludge dewatering. With the JV’s production site, Kemira will provide customers premium quality DPAMs supported by backward integrated high-quality AMDs. This ensures a sustainable and cost-effective manufacturing capability, effectively fulfilling customer needs and requirements. It is also an important addition to balance the increasing demand for Kemira’s dry polymers globally.

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Chemical Engineers Develop ‘Greener’ Ammonia

LABORATORY EQUIPMENT | January 14, 2019

Ammonia, a compound first synthesized about a century ago, has dozens of modern uses and has become essential in making the fertilizer that now sustains most of our global food production. But while we've been producing ammonia at a large scale since the 1930s, it has been accomplished mainly in hulking chemical plants requiring vast amounts of hydrogen gas from fossil fuels—making ammonia among the most energy-intensive among all large-volume chemicals. A pair of researchers at Case Western Reserve University—one an expert in electro-chemical synthesis, the other in applications of plasmas—are working on fixing that. Researchers Julie Renner and Mohan Sankaran have come up with a new way to create ammonia from nitrogen and water at low temperature and low pressure. They've done it successfully in a laboratory without using hydrogen or the solid metal catalyst necessary in traditional processes.

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Aemetis expands capacity of Indian glycerin plant

Chemicals Technology | January 14, 2019

Aemetis’ Universal Biofuels subsidiary has completed a two-year upgrade of its biodiesel and glycerin plant in Kakinada, India. The work included installation of a pre-treatment unit to process low-cost and low-waste feedstock into oil, as well as the expansion of a boiler and other utility capacities. The company also implemented environmental systems to enable the production of 50 million gallons of biodiesel and bio-oil annually, while simultaneously operating the biodiesel, pre-treatment and glycerin refining units. At full capacity, the plant is expected to be able to refine approximately five million gallons of glycerin per year.

Read More

KEMIRA FORMS NEW JOINT VENTURE IN SOUTH KOREA

chemeng online | January 14, 2019

Kemira Oyj (Helsinki, Finland; www.kemira.com) has signed an agreement to establish a joint venture (JV) – Kemira Yongsan Chemicals Co. —in Ulsan, Republic of Korea, with Yongsan Chemicals, a privately-owned chemicals company in South Korea. Forming a joint venture in South Korea is an important step in expanding Kemira’s presence in Asia Pacific and driving profitable growth in the region. The new joint venture will produce dry polyacrylamide (DPAM), cationic monomer Q9 (AMD) and other chemicals, which are used for retention and drainage in packaging and paper production, as well as in wastewater treatment and in sludge dewatering. With the JV’s production site, Kemira will provide customers premium quality DPAMs supported by backward integrated high-quality AMDs. This ensures a sustainable and cost-effective manufacturing capability, effectively fulfilling customer needs and requirements. It is also an important addition to balance the increasing demand for Kemira’s dry polymers globally.

Read More

Chemical Engineers Develop ‘Greener’ Ammonia

LABORATORY EQUIPMENT | January 14, 2019

Ammonia, a compound first synthesized about a century ago, has dozens of modern uses and has become essential in making the fertilizer that now sustains most of our global food production. But while we've been producing ammonia at a large scale since the 1930s, it has been accomplished mainly in hulking chemical plants requiring vast amounts of hydrogen gas from fossil fuels—making ammonia among the most energy-intensive among all large-volume chemicals. A pair of researchers at Case Western Reserve University—one an expert in electro-chemical synthesis, the other in applications of plasmas—are working on fixing that. Researchers Julie Renner and Mohan Sankaran have come up with a new way to create ammonia from nitrogen and water at low temperature and low pressure. They've done it successfully in a laboratory without using hydrogen or the solid metal catalyst necessary in traditional processes.

Read More

Aemetis expands capacity of Indian glycerin plant

Chemicals Technology | January 14, 2019

Aemetis’ Universal Biofuels subsidiary has completed a two-year upgrade of its biodiesel and glycerin plant in Kakinada, India. The work included installation of a pre-treatment unit to process low-cost and low-waste feedstock into oil, as well as the expansion of a boiler and other utility capacities. The company also implemented environmental systems to enable the production of 50 million gallons of biodiesel and bio-oil annually, while simultaneously operating the biodiesel, pre-treatment and glycerin refining units. At full capacity, the plant is expected to be able to refine approximately five million gallons of glycerin per year.

Read More

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