Midland-based Dow Chemical Co.’s Packaging and Specialty Plastics business has opened its first North American Pack Studios — a center designed to enable collaboration to deliver more efficient commercialization of new products — that’s focused on laminating adhesive. The facility, located in Ringwood, Ill., is the company’s seventh Pack Studios location globally.
The Ringwood facility, which will operate as a technology training center for North America, is equipped with a collaboration room and an industrial-scale Nordmeccanica Super Combi 3000 laminator line, rapid prototyping and modeling technologies, product development capabilities, and application testing availability.
The facility offers similar features as the company’s Pack Studios in Mozzate, Italy, which opened in 2015, and was started in collaboration with Nordmeccanica SpA, a global company that focuses on coating, laminating, and metalizing machinery for laminating adhesives development.
“Pack Studios Ringwood gives our customers an opportunity to leverage Dow’s global network of expertise, broad product portfolio, and application testing capabilities with Nordmeccanica’s equipment excellence to accelerate the development of game changing laminating adhesives solutions for the packaging industry,” says Karen S. Carter, North America commercial vice president for Dow Packaging and Specialty Plastics.
Pack Studios Ringwood joins the company’s six established Pack Studios facilities in Freeport, Texas; Horgen, Switzerland; São Paulo; Shanghai; Mozzate, Italy; and Singapore.
Dow Adhesives, a subsidiary of Dow, oversees a portfolio of acrylic, epoxy, polyolefin, and polyurethane-based adhesives, binders, coatings, and dispersions for applications in automotive, building and construction, consumer durables, packaging, textiles, and hygiene markets. In 2015, Dow had annual sales of nearly $49 billion and employed 49,500 people worldwide. The company’s more than 6,000 product families are manufactured at 179 sites in 35 countries.
