Asia will have the largest capacity for bio-based PLA resins by 2020

Asia will have the largest capacity for bio-based PLA resins by 2020. Worldwide PLA capacity is estimated to rise from 182,000 metric tons a year in 2011 to 721,000 metric tons in 2020, with Asian capacity projected to be just under half, with more than 350,000 metric tons, according to research from Thailand’s National Innovation Agency and the Hürth, Germany-based Nova Institute GmbH, presented at a recent conference in Thailand.

North America currently dominates PLA production, accounting for two-thirds of global capacity with over 120,000 metric tons, and that’s projected to grow to about 200,000 metric tons by 2020.

“The incentives, the packages form the governments that have been set in place, is one part of [why Asian capacity will grow rapidly] ,” said Wolfgang Baltus, the senior project advisor for the Bangkok-based NIA, noting that Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and other countries in the region have government support for bio-based materials of all sorts.

“It is also of course the raw materials they have here,” said Baltus, in a speech and interview at the Flexpo Bangkok conference, held Sept. 17-19, in Thailand. Flexpo is sponsored by Houston-based Chemical Market Resources Inc.

Baltus, who is part of a Nova Institute expert committee on bioplastics trends and helps the think tank estimate Asian production, said the figures will be part of an upcoming Nova report.

In his Flexpo presentation, he said the Asian domestic market demand for PLA remains weak, and that could mean that much of the added PLA production capacity in Asia will be exported.

Thailand is hoping to become a bioplastics hub. The country’s largest plastics maker PTT Chemical Public Co. Ltd., for example, last year bought a 50 percent of major American PLA maker Natureworks LLC, and the Thai government in 2008 began committing substantial research funding to bioplastics.

Natureworks currently makes 85 percent of the world’s PLA, and even with global expansions by others, will still likely have more than 50 percent of global capacity by 2020, Baltus said.

The research also showed that Chinese PLA resin production volumes “collapsed” between 2007 and 2011, as companies there had problems with the quality of their lactic acid, a key building block of PLA, Baltus said.

Chinese exports of PLA dropped from 4,400 metric tons in 2007 to 237 metric tons in 2009, and remained at those low levels in 2010 and 2011. That has boosted Chinese imports of PLA from about 1,200 metric tons in 2007 to 4,000 metric tons last year, he said.

Baltus said the report was developed with extensive interviews with more than 20 companies in the PLA production chain.

Source: http://www.plasticsnews.com