Today was our first professional site visit to one of the many companies we are going to see on our trip, and the first place we went to see was Nouryon, a chemical production company. Nouryon is one of the leading supplies in polymerization materials such as organic peroxides, along with other chemicals. They have multiple offices across the world, but we spent our day in the Deventer site.
As we started the tour, we could see that it was a large plant with a lot of research and development centers across the entire facility. We were then shown two presentations that mentioned the main ideas and topics we were going to see on our trip which were around the sustainability of the chemicals and their environmental and handling safety during use. We were shown the life-cycle of polymers, how recycling came into play, and finally how the chemicals used in the creation of polymers are created at Nouryon. After these presentations, we were given lunch and then allowed to go on tour of the three main laboratories that worked on: ecotoxicology, biodegradibility, and safe handling.
First, we went to the ecotoxicology lab, where we met Matt (who may be British or Australian, it’s up for debate), and he showed us his work that he does with the chemicals that he’s asked to test. He showed us how he works with small colonies of worms and amoeba to test whether the presence of the specific chemical results in the death of the organisms. These tests looked relatively simple, and he stated that they were too, but that it was sometimes hard to remove the chemicals to check for specific details after the tests. However, the lab was very interesting. We then moved onto biodegradability, where we saw how simple tests measuring the digestion of target chemicals by the bacteria found in river water. There were many ways to measure this, but the lab at Nouryon used oxygen consumption over a long period of time as their way of measuring it. Such simple yet effective tests were really intriguing to me and made me realize that sometimes there are direct methods of measurement that can be taken for certain experimentation.
Finally, we toured the safe handling lab, where we were shown how the storage and handling of many chemicals must be done, at what conditions to chemicals become unstable, and how Nouryon teaches and explains these handling criteria to customers. We ended the tour by seeing the vault where they work with volatile conditions. Finally, we were given one more presentation on the plastic lifecycle and recycling, which was very informative and discussed their new technology that allowed for more recyclate to be used in the production of materials of any MFI, which was not possible before.
Of course, we then went to Rotterdam, and are going to continue to second half of our program there. Overall, today was very informative and intriguing for me, and it really showcased what engineering/biochemistry at the industrial level can look like.