packaging sector. The company also has
expansion plans to service other coatings and manufacturing industries that
Michelman supports worldwide.
Appointed as Co-directors of
Michelman India are Pankaj Shah,
Supack’s founder, and Steven Wong,
Michelman’s VP/managing director, Asia
Pacific. With the Supack acquisition, the
Mumbai, India based Michelman India
hosts a business center, laboratory, and an
experienced team of sales, technical service and business operations personnel.
By keeping the existing team intact, customers will experience a seamless continuation of business and technical services.
The facility’s laboratory has been
equipped recently with several industry
accepted product testing capabilities for
packaging, printing, and coating appli-cations. With this direct and increased
physical presence in India, customers can
expect Michelman to quickly develop
innovative technologies for the Indian
market.
Dow Partners with
American Chemical Society
The Dow Chemical Company and the
American Association of Chemistry
Teachers (AACT) are partnering to invigorate chemistry education and support
STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education in the nation’s
schools.
Dow and AACT will work together to
convene a series of teacher summits and
create more than 750 lesson plans, multimedia resources, demonstrations and
other high-quality chemistry teaching
materials for use in K– 12 classrooms. The
work will be supported by a $1 million
contribution from Dow to AACT spread
over a four year period.
AACT was launched in 2014 by the
American Chemical Society (ACS), the
world’s largest scientific society. The partnership with Dow promotes the main goal
of AACT—to provide its members with
resources that foster top-notch chemistry
instruction grounded in everyday life.
“We are thrilled to be working to-
gether with Dow to support teachers
of chemistry across the country and de-
velop the workforce of the tomorrow,”
said Madeleine Jacobs, ACS executive
director and chief executive officer. “We
hope that this partnership can serve as a
model that will catalyze greater engage-
ment between chemical industries and
local communities.”
“A skilled STEM workforce fuels in-
novation and economic prosperity and
creates solutions that improve the qual-
ity of life for people across the globe.
At Dow, we value teachers’ critical role,
both in inspiring chemistry excitement
and in helping students to gain the key
skills they need to be successful in STEM
careers,” said Andrew N. Liveris, Dow’s
chairman and chief executive officer. “As
the founding partner of this program,
we are proud to collaborate with ACS
on this first of its kind community to
empower chemistry teachers inside and
outside of the classroom as they work to
inspire the next generation of innovators
and entrepreneurs.”
Dow’s STEM mission is to build the
workforce of tomorrow by supporting
teachers, motivating student achieve-
ment, developing careers, and collaborat-
ing with communities to transform STEM
education into a driver for innovation,
manufacturing, and economic prosper-
ity. Through its STEMtheGAP™ initia-
tives, including the AACT partnership,
Dow strives to provide more resources to
teachers, drive excitement in young peo-
ple around STEM topics and increase the
number of students who choose STEM
majors, ultimately preparing these stu-
dents to be successful in STEM careers.
“This new partnership comes at a crit-
ical time,” said Adam Boyd, AACT pro-
gram director. “Enrollment in high school
chemistry classes is on the rise. Yet, only
35 percent of high school chemistry
teachers have both a bachelor’s degree
in chemistry and are actually certified to
teach it.”
In order to prepare these teachers for
the challenges they face in the chemistry
classroom, Dow and AACT will host a
series of teacher summits in cities around
the country, with the first summit occur-
ring this summer in Midland, Michigan.
Approximately 30 chemistry teachers
from surrounding communities will at-
tend the weeklong summit. They will work
with Dow volunteers, known as
Dow STEM Ambassadors, to
identify improvement opportuni-
ties in K– 12 classroom resources
and develop lesson plans, multimedia
presentations and other materials that
better meet teachers’ needs. As part of
this effort, Dow STEM Ambassadors will
help teachers incorporate career-based
examples into their teaching resources,
educating students on future potential ca-
reer opportunities.
Lesson plans and other classroom
materials developed at the Dow-AACT
teacher summits will be available to
AACT members via the association’s
website, www.teachchemistry.org.
BASF to Increase Capacity
for Butanediol
BASF will increase its production capacities for the chemical intermediate 1,4-bu-
tanediol (BDO) by 10 percent at its site
in Geismar, Louisiana, as of 2016. The
company will then have a global capacity
of BDO of 670,000 metric tons per year.
BASF will also examine further measures to strengthen and to expand its
BDO value chain at the Geismar site. To
increase the capacities of BDO according to the steadily growing customer
demand, BASF continuously implements
measures to boost efficiency and improve
infrastructure at all of its sites.Besides its
Geismar site, BASF is producing BDO
at its sites in Ludwigshafen, Germany;
Kuantan, Malaysia; Caojing, China and
Chiba, Japan. In addition, a new BDO
site, a joint venture of BASF and the
Chinese company Xinjiang Markor, is
expected to begin production of 100,000
metric tons BDO per year in 2015.
“Being the leading producer of BDO
globally, we continue to expand our production capacity step wise to support the
growth of our customers as a reliable
partner,” said Stefan Blank, President,
BASF Intermediates division.
BDO is used for producing plastics,
solvents, electronic chemicals and elastic fibers. Depending on the production
technology, the starting materials for
the production of conventional BDO
are natural gas, coal, butane, butadiene
and propylene. CW
