Covestro has announced that yet another of its production sites has now obtained ISCC Plus certification. The company’s Map Ta Phut site in Thailand has successfully joined the growing group of Covestro sites that have demonstrated compliance with the requirements of the ISCC standard.
ISCC PLUS certification is an internationally recognized system for biomass and bioenergy sustainability certification. Having been granted this certification, the site can now supply customers in the ASEAN region with drop-in high-performance polycarbonate, including compounds and polycarbonate films, produced with alternative raw materials and offering the same level of quality as their fossil-based counterparts.
"With this, we are continuing to drive forward the replacement of fossil raw materials with alternative precursors,” said Timo Slawinski, managing director and head of the Map Ta Phut site.
In the mass balance approach, bio-based or recycled raw materials are fed in at an early stage of raw material extraction and mathematically assigned to the finished products. This saves fossil raw materials and reduces CO2 emissions, while the quality of the mass-balanced products remains identical to that of those based purely on fossil resources.
Mass-balanced products such as Makrolon RE plastics, which are part of Covestro’s CQ family of circular intelligent solutions, and Makrofol films which have a significantly lower carbon footprint than fossil-based products can now be supplied from the cross-segment site.
The company received its first shipment of the mass-balanced raw materials phenol and acetone from an Asian supplier in August, and recently produced its first batch of biocircular ISCC Plus-certified polycarbonate in Map Ta Phut.
In addition to the Thai facility, Covestro's sites in Shanghai, Changhua, Leverkusen, Dormagen, Krefeld-Uerdingen, Antwerp and Filago are all also certified to the ISCC Plus standard.