Former Artenius plant back in business

Apr 12 2010 by Sue Scott, Evening Gazette

THE tap on the UK's only domestic supply of a key chemical used in the manufacturer of food packaging was turned on again this morning as Wilton's former Artenius plant dispatched its first consignment since being bought out of administration in January.

“The mood is emotional and extremely proud,” said business director Mark Kenrick after releasing 100t of pure terephthalic acid (PTA) from an initial 2000t that ran through the T8 plant on Friday.

The T8 line was the first casualty in the crisis that engulfed Artenius when Spanish parent La Seda de Barcelona raised a red flag in February last year.

Starved of cash as La Seda battled to restructure its debt, Artenius closed first the T8 and then its small polyethylene terephthalate (PET) line, eventually putting more than 250 people out of work as administrators walked in.

This weekend, though, with nearly 160 new jobs restored, the 150,000t PET plant was also being brought back on line with the company predicting it would hit full production on both “within the next few weeks”.

Mr Kenrick said “a high proportion” of the 160 jobs created when South Korean giant Lotte acquired Artenius for its KP Chemicals division, had been filled by original Artenius staff, but he admitted that many had been disappointed.

“It was always going to be difficult, there was always going to be heartache,” he said. Many are still fighting for redundancy top ups and pension rights after they were left with statutory minimums after decades of service to a succession of plant operators, beginning with ICI.

Mr Kenrick said an “incredible amount of hard work” had gone into restarting the plant after an outage of 14 months.

“Many people didn’t think we would have it up before June - especially among our competitors. But we recruited 100 people, and went back to suppliers.”

Mr Kenrick said the plant had “plenty of orders for both PTA and PET”.

“The target now is to build customer profile.”

Stan Higgins, chief executive for the North East Process Industry Cluster (NEPIC) said it was good news for the UK chemical industry.

The rapid reinstatement was “no surprise”, he said, given the availability of highly skilled local engineers, scientists and operatives.

In net terms, he said the process industry in the North-east counted more jobs now than it did two years ago.