FEBURARY - MARCH - 20248 CHEMICAL INDUSTRY REVIEWIN MY OPINIONWhat are some of the major challenges and trends that have been impacting the Industrial Coating Marketspace lately?One main challenge facing our world is the reduction of the carbon footprint with a lot more companies aligning to generate products from renewable sources. There are multiple challenges facing the industry, but particularly two are top of mind. Currently, all companies in the industry are experiencing shortages of some type. Overall, shortages of raw materials prompt companies to find alternatives through innovation. And often times, achieving a relatively close match with a replacement raw material or technology becomes the focus during shortages.At WACKER, we want to help all of our customers navigate these challenges and find solutions for their applications. We are looking to meet these goals in product development and production by creating carbon-friendly products and renewable materials as much as possible and substituting the use of methanol with biomethanol. In fact, our RHYME program, (Renewable Hydrogen and Methanol) is focused on the work of decarbonization. With this project, we are aiming to produce green hydrogen and renewable methanol for energy use.Sustainability is one of our five corporate strategic goals and we are aiming at providing innovative solutions to the world through sustainable business practices. Over the last few years, a lot of focus has been placed on companies to reduce the VOC (volatile organic compounds) from their operations. A fair number of advancements have been made to generate water-based formulations, however, for some applications, performance fall short to the performance of solvent-based formulations. We believe we will see continuous improvements for water-based systems, but efforts to improve the performance will still take years to maximize.By Dr. Daniel Calimente, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, Wacker [ETR:WCH] DELIVERING SILICONE RESINS WITH NEXT-GEN APPLICATIONSDr. Daniel Calimente
< Page 7 | Page 9 >