by Marina MALYGINA, journalist An innovative packing material plant has been commissioned at Aramil in the Urals, 15 kilometers away from its capital, the city of Yekaterinburg, to turn out upgraded wrappings modified by nanocomposites produced on the spot. The rated capacity of this plant (Uralplastik-N) is as much as 1,800 tons of flexfilm a month, or about 650 mln blocks with prepacked food or household chemicals. The new wrappers will oust conventional high-cost materials, such as polyamides, gas-impermeable multilayer films and a variety of PVC. Today the flexfilm wrappers are a booming market, its mean annual growth rates topping 60 percent. Experts predict a 2-to-2.5-fold rate of increase yearly, and this is quite understandable since flexible polymers are remarkable for excellent protective characteristics keeping off lots of unwanted substances like oils, fats, chemicals, and so forth. They keep off microorganisms and UV radiation, too. They are both durable and safe. Their production technologies are being upgraded all along. One way of doing that is to make use of various modifiers, nanocomposites among them, capable of increasing the storage life of products without deteriorating the characteristics of the stock material and at the same time minimizing the amount of waste disposed of. These technologies are part of the process. Such is the line steered by Uralplastik, a major "gambler" on Russia's polymer market. In fact the Ural nanobusiness did not start from the word go. The forerunner of Uralplastik set up back in 1941 first handled plastics for the defense industry and with war's end, it switched to polyethylene (as of 1959) стр. 52 Shorthand of nanocomposite-modified polymer wrapper. and polyamide (as of 1981) films. Yet with the transition to a market-oriented economy in the 1990s its output shrank, the plant became heavily in debt and actually on the brink of a bankruptcy. But it had a good ... Читать далее