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Business

Bottle Battle Brews

by Marc S. Reisch
January 4, 2010 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 88, Issue 1

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Credit: Shutterstock
Credit: Shutterstock

Eastman Chemical has filed a lawsuit against Indorama Polymers charging the Thailand-based polyester producer with stealing manufacturing trade secrets and using them in a just-opened $140 million polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plant in Decatur, Ala. In a complaint filed in federal court on Dec. 18, 2009, Eastman seeks unspecified damages and a court order to prevent Indorama from infringing on three patents that encompass Eastman’s IntegRex technology. Indorama did not respond to C&EN inquiries by press time, but according to its website, the 432,000-metric-ton-per-year Decatur facility, known as AlphaPet, uses technology called melt-to-resin (MTR) from the engineering firm Uhde Inventa-Fischer. MTR, like IntegRex, is touted as producing PET, used to make soda and water bottles, in half the footprint of a conventional PET plant and at a much lower cost. Uhde says it cannot comment on the legal dispute. In early 2008, Eastman sold Indorama two European PET plants that use older conventional technology. The U.S. firm alleges that former Eastman employees now working for Indorama were familiar with the IntegRex technology and that they “improperly used and disclosed Eastman’s confidential, proprietary, and trade secret information.”

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