CHEMICAL MANAGEMENT
Businesswire | June 02, 2023
Azelis a leading innovation service provider in the specialty chemicals and food ingredients industry, announces that it has signed an agreement to acquire 100% of the shares of Sirius International (“Sirius”), a well-established distributor of specialty chemicals in the Benelux market.
This acquisition complements Azelis’ lateral value chain in home care and industrial cleaning with an attractive portfolio and aligns perfectly with Azelis' ambition to become a world-leading innovation service provider. Pioneering in the formulation of sustainable cleaning products from biodegradable and/or recyclable chemical raw materials and with expertise in green chemicals, Sirius will reinforce Azelis' best-in-class sustainability program and enable it to offer innovative environmental solutions to its customers in the EMEA region and beyond.
Founded in 2004 by current CEO Leo Verboeket, Sirius is a distributor of environmentally friendly chemicals for the detergent, personal care and water treatment markets in Europe. Based in Baarn, the Netherlands, this team of experienced professionals has an established market position and longstanding relationships with its principals, providing innovative products to European customers.
Leo Verboeket, CEO Sirius, comments
“We are excited to join Azelis’ family, a company that shares our values and commitment to sustainability. We look forward to developing more innovative solutions for our customers and expanding the reach of our current offerings to customers worldwide. This partnership will allow us to leverage Azelis' global network and expertise in sustainable chemistry, as we work together towards our shared goal of making a positive impact on the environment and society.”
Evy Hellinckx, Managing Director Azelis Benelux, adds
“By joining forces with Sirius, we are delighted to strengthen our presence in, among others, the home care and industrial cleaning markets in the Benelux and EMEA region. We are committed to promoting sustainable solutions across all sectors of the chemical industry, and we believe that this partnership will help us achieve our goals. We look forward to working with the talented team at Sirius to drive innovation and deliver value to our customers, while staying true to our shared values of sustainability and responsible business practices.”
About Azelis
Azelis is a leading global innovation service provider in the specialty chemical and food ingredients industry, present in 63 countries across the globe with over 3,800 employees. Our knowledgeable teams of industry, market and technical experts are each dedicated to a specific market within Life Sciences and Industrial Chemicals. We offer a lateral value chain of complementary products to more than 59,000 customers, supported by +2,700 principal relationships, creating a turnover of €4.1 billion (2022). Azelis Group NV is listed on Euronext Brussels under ticker AZE.
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MARKET OUTLOOK
Businesswire | May 19, 2023
SAR Technology Inc. located in Tainan, Taiwan, has contracted with MECS, Inc. a subsidiary of Elessent Clean Technologies for the supply of MECS® proprietary technology and equipment in support of a new spent acid regeneration plant. By incorporating MECS® sulfuric acid recovery technology in its electronic grade sulfuric acid plant, SAR Inc. will position themselves as a reliable supplier of regenerable high purity sulfuric acid and will be able to provide significant support to the semiconductor industry in Taiwan which is the world’s largest consumption country of e-grade sulfuric acid.
“SAR Inc. chose MECS because we know their sulfuric acid technology and equipment are top of the line. By selecting MECS® regeneration technology, in combination with SAR Inc. patented technology, our new plant will regenerate acid waste for reuse by our semiconductor customers and meet the government’s progressive environmental objectives. Our company is in a unique position as the semiconductor industry booms in Taiwan, and as such, it is very important to SAR Inc. to be able to contribute to a circular economy to help semiconductor clients achieve their ESG and sustainability goals,” said Johnny Fang, CEO and founder, SAR Technology, Inc.
The semiconductor industry is one of the fastest growing markets in the world, and its manufacturing process creates numerous by-product waste streams. Disposal of this waste has become a challenge with the extreme growth experienced by the industry, and one way to combat waste disposal issues is by recycling the by-product spent acid from semiconductor fabrication. MECS designs sulfuric acid regeneration plants to balance operating temperature, acid concentrations and corrosion rates to ensure consistent, productive uptime of the equipment while guaranteeing environmental compliance and offering proven protection of plant equipment from acid condensation. MECS® technology also meets the rigorous quality requirements of high-quality e-grade acid making it a perfect fit for regeneration in the semiconductor industry.
“We are highly active in the market, and every manufacturer in the industry wishes to embrace a circular economy on waste streams, especially at a time with such high demand. It is exciting to work with SAR Inc. who is shouldering the responsibility to ensure the sustainability of the e-grade acid supply chain,” said Eli Ben-Shoshan, CEO, Elessent.
SAR Inc. was established in 2018 to provide a full-cycle electronic-grade sulfuric acid factory to deliver a sustainable solution for by-product waste in the semiconductor industry. Startup of the plant is slated for June 2023 and is expected to improve utilization of domestic resources and help address sulfuric acid disposal challenges.
The MECS® sulfuric acid technology has been in use for nearly 100 years in the phosphate fertilizer, non-ferrous metals (leaching & smelting), oil refining and general chemical industries. MECS® technologies feature breakthrough solutions, many of which have revolutionized the performance, quality and cost-effectiveness of customer operations. They include MECS® heat recovery systems (HRS™), MECS® SolvR® regenerative SO2 scrubbing and MECS® MAX3™ sulfuric acid production technology. Integrated into these MECS® technologies are proven specialty products such as catalysts, Brink® mist eliminators, DynaWave® scrubbers, ZeCor® corrosion resistant alloy products, and acid coolers all of which are specifically designed for the most demanding operating environments. Licensed and marketed by Elessent Clean Technologies, the MECS® technology is the world-leading sulfuric acid production technology with more than 400 licensed acid plants worldwide since the 1960’s. Elessent Technologies is committed to long-term customer satisfaction and support for the life of customer assets.
About Elessent Clean Technologies
Elessent Clean Technologies is a global leader in process technologies to drive sustainability and carbon neutrality in the metal, fertilizer, chemical and oil refining industries with an unwavering commitment to customer support. We provide extensive global expertise across our portfolio of offerings in key applications – MECS® sulfuric acid production, STRATCO® alkylation, BELCO® wet scrubbing and IsoTherming® hydroprocessing. Offering critical process equipment, products, technology and services, we enable an array of industrial markets, including phosphate fertilizer, non-ferrous metals, oil refining, petrochemicals and chemicals, to minimize their environmental impact and optimize productivity. We are dedicated to helping our customers produce high-quality products used in everyday life in the safest, most environmentally-sound way possible, with a vision to make the world a better place by creating clean alternatives to traditional industrial processes.
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CHEMICAL MANAGEMENT, MARKET OUTLOOK
Businesswire | April 24, 2023
Carbios a pioneer in the development and industrialization of biological technologies to reinvent the life cycle of plastics and textiles, has accelerated its enzyme screening process with a microfluidic technology developed in partnership with the Paul Pascal Research Centre (a joint research unit of the CNRS and the University of Bordeaux, which specializes in microfluidics). This cutting-edge technology enables the screening of millions of enzymes in just one day, speeding up the process to optimize enzymes breaking down PET. This competitive advantage enables Carbios to reduce the time between the R&D phase and the production of its proprietary enzymes, and therefore to develop concrete solutions to plastic pollution even faster.
"Since having applied microfluidics to our screening process more than a year ago, we have analyzed millions of enzymes, which would have taken years beforehand," explains Prof. Alain Marty, Chief Scientific Officer at Carbios. "This technology gives access to a large variety of enzymes in record time. Microfluidics has enabled us to optimize the enzyme presented in 2020 in the journal Nature, and it is this optimized enzyme that will be used in our first industrial reference unit in 2025."
"Microfluidics is already widely used in medical diagnostics to analyze biological samples. When Carbios approached us to use it for new industrial applications, this was a first," said Jean-Christophe Baret, Professor at the University of Bordeaux and team leader at the Paul Pascal Research Center hosted by the CNRS. "We are very pleased to develop new methods using the power of microfluidics for an environmental cause such as the reduction of plastic pollution."
Microfluidics: the science of droplets
Microfluidics allows the production of devices handling very small amounts of liquid. Each droplet generated can be considered as an independent microreactor having a volume in the picoliter range (10-12 liters) and containing a particular enzyme whose PET depolymerization activity will be screened. These droplets move through analysis units the size of a microchip allowing ultra-high throughput screening of 150 enzymes per second.
Previously, conventional robotic systems allowed screening in microplate format with a volume in the milliliter range (10-3 liters) and with rates of around one enzyme per minute.
The use of microfluidics to screen for more efficient or new enzymes will become widely adopted in the coming years, therefore accelerating the development of bioprocessing. Currently used by Carbios for the development of its PET depolymerization process, microfluidics should be used to accelerate the development of new enzymes for other types of plastic such as polyamide.
Carbios researchers specialized in microfluidics
Microfluidic processes require special expertise. At present, two researchers at Carbios are dedicated to microfluidics and based in the cooperative laboratory with TBI3 hosted by INSA4 Toulouse. Alexandra Tauzin, Researcher in Enzyme Engineering and Microfluidics, and Alexandre Gilles, Engineer specialized in robotics, work in partnership with the Paul Pascal Research Center.
About Carbios
Established in 2011 by Truffle Capital, Carbios is a green chemistry company, developing biological and innovative processes. Through its unique approach of combining enzymes and plastics, Carbios aims to address new consumer expectations and the challenges of a broad ecological transition by taking up a major challenge of our time: plastic and textile pollution. Carbios deconstructs any type of PET (the dominant polymer in bottles, trays, textiles made of polyester) into its basic components which can then be reused to produce new PET plastics with equivalent quality to virgin ones. This PET innovation, the first of its kind in the world, was recognized in April 2020 in a scientific paper published on the front cover of the prestigious journal Nature. Carbios successfully started up its demonstration plant in Clermont-Ferrand in 2021. It has now taken another key step towards the industrialization of its process with the construction of a first-of-a-kind unit in partnership with Indorama Ventures.
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