# Indorama Company radar · 575 documents · 2021-01-01–2026-11-03 · updated 2026-10-31 Canonical: https://slate.greyb.com/radar/indorama/innovations ## In one minute ### The recycling business is a bottle-washing business Indorama's rPET plants are mechanical lines: sort, wash, grind, and where food contact is required, re-extrude to pellet. The EcoMex plant at Zapopan runs a second line of Tomra optical sorters handling both incoming bottles and flake, sized for 30,000 tonnes of flake a year [1]. Athens, Alabama, added an AMUT wash line costing $51.5m to take food-grade flake from 65 million to 155 million pounds a year [2]. Juiz de Fora went from 9,000 to 25,000 tonnes with $20m of washing equipment that strips labels, grinds bottles under water and cut process water use by 70% [3]. Nothing in the record shows Indorama operating a depolymerisation reactor of its own. 1. [recyclingtoday.com](https://www.recyclingtoday.com/news/indorama-tomra-pet-plastic-recycling-mexico-ecomex/) 2. [resource-recycling.com](https://resource-recycling.com/plastics/2021/06/03/indorama-invests-over-50-million-in-alabama-rpet-plant/) 3. [spnews.com](https://spnews.com/indorama-triples-recycling/) ### The recycled bottle is sold to a named brand, and often one that owns a piece of the plant Across the recycling build, the customer appears inside the deal. PETValue in the Philippines was built with Coca-Cola Beverages Philippines under Coca-Cola's collection programme, sized to recycle about two billion bottles a year. In India the partner is Varun Beverages, PepsiCo's second-largest bottler outside the US, in a joint venture aimed at 100,000 tonnes of rPET across plants at Kathua and Khurdha. In Lagos, Nigerian Breweries holds 29% of the 45,000-tonne food-grade plant. In Thailand, Suntory PepsiCo takes the preforms from 2028, with Iwatani's film-to-preform technology in the plant. ### The inventions have turned to the plant floor The 2026 filings divide into two halves, and the smaller half is the chemistry. What continues there is the recycled-carbon programme: the flame-retardant copolymer built on recycled BHET, now republished across successive national offices rather than extended into new chemistry, oxygen-barrier PET aimed at glass substitution, and the recycled-flake tyre cord that takes rPET into a fatigue-limited application. ### Chemical recycling is bought as a licence, and it has not been built Indorama's route to monomer is a partnership, not a plant. The Carbios agreement covers an enzymatic plant of about 50,000 tonnes a year on land carved out of Indorama's existing Longlaville PET site, with Indorama mobilising around €110m in equity and non-convertible loan. The process is enzymatic depolymerisation of post-consumer PET back to monomers. Financial close has slipped repeatedly; the latest target puts commissioning in the first half of 2028. Indorama's own chemical recycling is therefore a claim on someone else's process engineering. ### Fibres are sold as brand families, and the claims get tested in public Indorama does not sell recycled polyester as a specification. It sells deja, the recycled family, and stronga for demanding industrial applications, both presented at Techtextil in April 2026 against customers' need for scalable regional supply. ### Recycled monomer is being reformulated into a flame-retardant copolymer The most technically complete recycling chemistry in the record starts from recycled bis(2-hydroxyethyl) terephthalate rather than virgin acid, glycol or DMT. The copolymer is built by polycondensation of rBHET with a phosphorus-functional comonomer, using non-antimony catalysis and controlling residual diethylene glycol so that phosphorus loadings of 0.7% by weight and above can be reached without wrecking the polymer. The stated target is DIN 4102 B1 flame performance in fibres, filaments and bicomponent yarns. This is the interesting move in the whole recycling portfolio: it takes the output of chemical recycling and makes a product virgin PET cannot match, rather than a like-for-like substitute. ### The fertilizer business sells everything it makes, and the export ledger is the scoreboard In 2025 the Nigerian operation produced 2.7 million tonnes of urea at 103% capacity utilisation, its highest on record, and accounted for more than 18% of the country's non-oil exports in 2024. Nigerian nitrogenous fertilizer exports were worth about $1.01 billion in 2024, making the country the tenth-largest supplier worldwide. ### Barrier PET is being engineered to do a glass job The barrier work attacks two failure modes at once. One line blends a PTMEG-based polymer into PET for oxygen scavenging while holding clarity and staying mechanically recyclable. The other is a monolayer bottle built with more than 4% poly(meta-xylylene adipamide) acting as both an oxygen consumer and a passive barrier, a sulfonated isophthalate copolyester as ionic compatibiliser, and a transition metal catalyst; the claims are oxygen ingress of 1 ppm or less and carbonation loss under 25%, both measured six months after filling. Six-month stability is the right test, and it is far enough out that the numbers are real engineering rather than bench chemistry. ## Overview ### The growth money has moved to nitrogen The third Eleme train was commissioned at 2,300 tonnes a day of ammonia and 4,000 of urea, and the gas behind it is contracted twice over: 40 to 52 million cubic feet a day since January 2026, and a further 60 million a day for sixteen years from 2028. Henan adds roughly two million tonnes of urea capacity on RMB 2.4bn from five Chinese banks, with no multilateral lender in the structure. Ain Sokhna was closed with IFC and EBRD as matched A and B loans, 348m against a 525m project. Read together, those two deals show a working substitute for development-finance conditionality, and the company uses it. ## What's new The market moved faster than the company did. Forbes profiled Aloke Lohia's turnaround on 1 October, a defence of the stock followed on 7 October, and by 8 October brokers were carrying a THB 28 target. The Frankfurt line added 4.35% on 20 October to reach EUR 0.72. ## Research ### Recycled flake is being spun into tyre cord The tyre-cord patent describes the whole line, not just a formulation: recycled chips are solid-state thickened to raise viscosity, melt-extruded, spun, coagulated and oiled, then drawn across four roller sets held at 90°C or below, unheated, 225°C or below, and 180°C or below, to hold crystallinity under 45%. The resulting yarn is twisted and impregnated and claimed to match virgin PET cord in dimensional stability. That is the harder version of recycling: not bottle-to-bottle, where the specification is forgiving, but a dynamic application where fatigue and shrinkage decide whether the material is used. ### Seat padding is a welded fibre network, not foam The automotive cushioning replaces polyurethane foam with a three-dimensional network of randomly bonded continuous linear structures, welded to each other at their crossing points and containing at least one thermoplastic elastomer; a clamping device is moulded so its material fills the gaps between the strands. The retaining element is fixed to the fibre entanglement by ultrasonic vibration fusion, and there is a dedicated thermoforming tool for shaping the network into a seat cushion. The engineering claim is structural: a welded lattice carries load where foam relies on cell collapse, and the ultrasonic bond is what makes it a part rather than a batt. ### The compostable fibre is built on a melting-point gap The bicomponent biodegradable fibre uses a PLA core and a poly(butylene succinate) shell with at least a 5°C melting-point difference between them, spun as tow and drawn in one step between frames held at 30–80°C and 20–35°C, giving 0.5–3 dtex with hot-air shrinkage of 0 to 10% at 110°C and crystallisation induced by steam. A parallel family swaps the shell for a semicrystalline grade of PHA or polycaprolactone blended 10–90% with PLA, and the stated reason is processability: the semicrystalline minor phase cuts filament breaks and thermal shrinkage enough to run the line. Both are home-composting designs, which is a tighter constraint than industrial composting. ### Antibacterial fibre works by coating the surface, not by compounding the resin The fibre carries its biocide on the outside. Polylysine or a biguanide is applied at 0.02 to 0.06% of fibre weight with a cationic or nonionic surfactant at 0.01% or more, via oiling rolls, immersion or spray after spinning, drawing or drying, and the nonwoven is then made by carding with through-air, spunlace or needle-punch bonding. The design logic is explicit in the filing: putting the active in the resin body wastes it and raises cost. Surface application also lets the fibre keep the crimp and carding behaviour a nonwoven line needs, which a loaded compound would compromise. ### In the oilfield chemistry, the carrier is the invention The corrosion inhibitor is a two-component system. An alkoxylated polyamine derived from AEEA, EDA, DETA, TETA or TEPA does the protecting, but on its own it partitions poorly in a separated oil-and-water system. Imidazoline, typically from tall oil fatty acid, is added at 10 to 30% by weight to act as the emulsifier that carries the polyamine between phases, and the blend is dosed at 5 to 100 ppm against carbon-dioxide corrosion in absorbers, strippers and heat exchangers. The follow-on filing claims the same composition for sweet corrosion service. That is an admission that the molecule alone was not the product. ### The one visible process loop ties the acid plant to the fertilizer plant Ammonia is vaporised at the fertilizer site and piped to the sulphuric acid plant, where it is injected into the SOx scrubber to make ammonium sulphate; the sulphate solution is returned to the fertilizer plant as diammonium phosphate feedstock. It is a closed loop between two plants that are usually separate businesses, and it is the only piece of process engineering this record contains for a fertilizer complex otherwise documented in tonnes, dollars and lenders. ### Several lines stop at the drawing board The oilfield chemistry, the cement-admixture fibres and the twist-measurement instruments all exist as filings with no plant, customer or volume attached. The twist meters are a good illustration of how far the invention goes: a Hall-effect sensor reads shaft angle against an embedded magnet, and a data module imports yarn parameters and exports the results, mounted on a servo-and-ball-screw test track. Precise, well-specified, and with no evidence in this record that a single unit has been sold. The pattern is consistent across all three: the company files the mechanism, and the commercial step does not follow. ## Market ### The Indian fertilizer arm buys its low-carbon ammonia at an auction price In India's eleventh green ammonia tender, 20,000 tonnes a year were awarded to Indorama India at a discovered tariff of ₹64.74 per kilogram, supplied by ACME Cleantech. ### In surfactants the growth is Asian, and the oilfield position was bought Indovinya's stated next phase rests on high-value additives, geographic growth and integration, with Asia-Pacific flagged as the opportunity. The concrete commitment is at Ankleshwar, where surfactant capacity is to more than double over two years to meet customer demand, backed by an expanded Mumbai R&D site. ### The packaging platform sells to toothpaste and beverage brands, and Brussels judged its scale small EPL brought 21 facilities in 11 countries, more than eight billion laminated tubes a year and customers among global oral care, beauty, cosmetics and pharmaceutical brands, with revenue of ₹4,137 crore and EBITDA of ₹806 crore in the twelve months to December 2024, growing around 17%. Indovida contributes rigid PET packaging described as entrenched with the largest beverage players. ### The most technically complete recycling chemistry has no buyer in the market record The flame-retardant copolymer built on recycled BHET and the monolayer oxygen-barrier bottle are fully specified as engineering: phosphorus loadings that hold fibre performance, six-month oxygen and carbonation results. Neither appears in the market record with a launch, a customer or a specification. ## Areas - Circular Economy & Sustainability · 189 documents - Specialty Chemicals & Materials · 144 documents - Core Petrochemicals & Polymers · 113 documents - Financial & Corporate Activities · 100 documents - Digital Transformation · 23 documents