What Happens to Lexan When the Busier Plant Closes

NexPoint Materials told you on Wednesday which of its two US polycarbonate plants it is closing. It did not say which one was busier.

Burkville, Alabama comes down near the end of the first quarter of 2027, and PC resin and compound production moves to Mount Vernon, Indiana.

The release carries no tonnage. It carries no headcount either.

"Which of these two plants has actually been carrying more work?"

The one being closed.

The Record the Release Doesn't Carry

Both of these plants have a paper trail that long predates NexPoint, and the useful part of it was filed with EPA rather than with investors.

In July 2023 SABIC Innovative Plastics US LLC wrote into the methylene chloride docket to fight a proposed prohibition that would have taken out its polycarbonate operations. That comment is the most detailed public description of these two sites anyone has published, and it says things the closure release does not.

It puts 1,000 SABIC personnel and 600 local contractors on the two PC assets combined, and says both have run for over four decades.

It spells out what Burkville does: "PC resin, compounded PC, and PC/acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS) pellets." And it calls Mount Vernon SABIC's largest facility in the United States.

Three months to the day before Wednesday's announcement, Mutares closed its $450m purchase of SABIC's engineering thermoplastics business across the Americas and Europe and renamed it NexPoint. The deal document is worth reading for what it bought: eight plants, roughly 1,085 kt of resin capacity and 780 kt of compounding, the second-largest polycarbonate position in the world, and the only PBT producer in the United States.

One of those eight plants is now going away, ninety-two days after the keys changed hands.

Alabama has no state WARN statute and runs on the federal one, so the number of people involved lands on the state list around late January, sixty days ahead of a closure timed for the end of March. As of this morning there is no NexPoint, SABIC, Burkville or Lowndes County entry anywhere on Alabama's 2026 WARN list, which runs to thirty-one filings and stops at November 2.