Matrìca: Porto Torres inaug­ur­ates new green chem­istry complex

Daniele Fer­rari, Chair­man, and Catia Bas­ti­oli, Man­aging Dir­ect­or of Matrìca, inaug­ur­ated the plant con­vert­ing veget­able oils into monomers and inter­me­di­ates, the base products for down­stream pro­duc­tion of more com­plex bio-products. In the com­ing months anoth­er two plants being built at the new Matrìca com­plex will come on-stream; at these two plants, monomers and inter­me­di­ates will be trans­formed into extens­or oils for the tyre industry and into a raft of innov­at­ive products with high added value, such as bases for bio-lub­ric­ants, plas­ti­cizers for poly­mers and products for cos­met­ic for­mu­la­tions. Rep­res­ent­ing a glob­al invest­ment of about 180 mil­lion Euro, the three plants will pro­duce a total capa­city of bio-products of approx­im­ately 70 thou­sand tons per year. The Matrìca products are the fruit of an innov­at­ive integ­ra­tion between agri­cul­ture and industry, com­bin­ing renew­ab­il­ity, sus­tain­ab­il­ity and bio­de­grad­ab­il­ity. They provide the highest per­form­ance levels required for for­mu­la­tion and pro­duc­tion of bio-plastics, bio-lub­ric­ants, products for house­hold care and per­son­al and health care, plant pro­tec­tion, addit­ives for the rub­ber and plastics industry, food fra­grances. ´The first Matrìca plant that we are inaug­ur­at­ing today, brought about by the stra­tegic part­ner­ship between Nova­mont and Ver­sal­is, uses a pro­pri­et­ary tech­no­logy rad­ic­ally dif­fer­ent from all oth­er exist­ing tech­no­lo­gies: it does not use ozone in the veget­able oil oxid­at­ive scis­sion reac­tion and allows us to pro­duce inter­me­di­ates known as azelaic acid and pelar­gon­ic acid, as well as new pro­pri­et­ary products, through a safe pro­cess with low envir­on­ment­al impact. This res­ult rep­res­ents a key step in a pro­cess that began more than 20 years ago with a stub­born group of research­ers work­ing in the bioplastics sec­tor and which is lead­ing to the cre­ation here in Sardin­ia of the first third-gen­er­a­tion integ­rated biore­finery and the con­ver­sion of oth­er sites in Italy”, said Catia Bas­ti­oli, Man­aging Dir­ect­or of Nova­mont and Matrìca. Source: PlasticNews​.com