About 100,000 tonnes of output will be withdrawn from the Ludwigshafen site from the middle of 2004

About 100,000 tonnes of output will be withdrawn from the Ludwigshafen site from the middle of 2004

BASF will stop manufacturing polystyrene compounds and niche products based on the polymer from the middle of next year. This will withdraw 100,000 tonnes of compound output from Ludwigshafen.

Compounded BASF polystyrene will still be available through licensed suppliers, but the company is backing its new Colorflexx partnership to enable customers to colour their own resin. BASF will sell its polystyrene business that contains special additives.

The group’s Styrolux SBS plant at Ludwigshafen is to be mothballed under the plans announced on Friday. European markets for the transparent styrene butadiene copolymer will in future be served from BASF’s Antwerp plant.

The North American Styrolux market, for which the Ludwigshafen site has been supplying pre-marketing material, will be supplied from a new plant being built at Altamira, Mexico. This is due to come on-stream in the fourth quarter of this year.

The restructuring programme, to be concluded by the middle of 2004, will affect 187 jobs, but BASF says there will be no compulsory redundancies. Wilfried Haensel, head of BASF’s European styrenics business, said: “With this capacity reduction we are reacting on the over-supply and the unsatisfactory margins in the European polystyrene business.”

The group has been stressing its future reliance on a small number of world-scale global plants to provide more efficient manufacture in the styrenics field. Next year it will complete a new ABS plant at Antwerp which will fit with this strategy. BASF’s current polystyrene capacity in Europe is between 550,00tpa and 600,000tpa.