Five Closures, No Mothballs
The October edition of the ledger, eight entries, and the first month in four with nothing idled, mothballed or held open for a restart. All five removals are closures, four of the five published no capacity figure at all, and the only two hard nameplates in the whole month's book came out of India.
We run two searches over every removal announcement that reaches this desk. The first is for the tonnage. The second is for the word that tells us whether anyone expects to see the plant again.
In October the second search came back empty five times out of five.
Goodyear is closing Niagara Falls and Bayport. Syngenta opened a consultation on closing Grangemouth.
AkzoNobel is closing Nashville powder coatings, Covestro intends to take Antwerp from four polycarbonate lines to one, and LyondellBasell stopped its last Brindisi polypropylene line on October 17.
No mothball. No indefinite idle. No until further notice.
Last month this desk published a rule: a company that prints a tonnage wants that tonnage counted, and wanting it counted usually means expecting it back. October is the first clean test of that rule, because October is the first month with nothing in the removal column that anybody is holding open.
"If the mothball language is gone, is the tonnage gone with it?"
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