Abu Dhabi Polymers Company (Borouge) has started production at its new plastics production plant at Shanghai, on China’s east coast.

The plastics compounding plant, which will produce up to 50,000 tonnes a year (t/y) of plastic resins, was officially inaugurated on 20 April, Borouge said in a statement released on the same day.

The plant is Borouge’s first outside of the UAE, and is part of the company’s strategy of expanding into the country, one of the world’s biggest plastics consumers, through the construction of new manufacturing and logistics infrastructure.

It is building a new import logistics centre next to the plant which will be able to handle up to 600,000 t/y of polyolefins, the basic petrochemicals used to make plastics, and says that the compounding plant’s capacity can be expanded to process up to 80,000 t/y in the future.

Borouge will start commissioning a $5bn second-phase expansion of its Ruwais plastics complex in May (MEED 9:3:10).

The project, known as Borouge 2, has been under construction since 2007, and will boost Borouge’s total plastics output to 2 million (t/y) from current levels of about 650,000 t/y.

The company is in the process of tendering the final three major construction deals on a third-phase expansion of its Ruwais plastics complex in Abu Dhabi, with final bids due in May, and will start early feasibility studies for a fourth phase of construction in 2011 (MEED 19:4:10).

The company will produce 4.5 million (t/y) of plastics when the Borouge 3 scheme is complete in early 2014.