Dow to Idle Latex Plants at Pittsburg, California and Varennes, Quebec
The Dow Chemical Company announced it will idle latex production facilities at Pittsburg, California and Varennes, Quebec by year end 2008. The Latex plants are two of six facilities that serve the North American paper, carpet, and performance latex industries. Together, these two plants employ approximately 35 people. Every effort will be made to redeploy as many employees as possible to other roles on their respective site but some redundancies will be unavoidable.
"The idling of our latex facilities in Pittsburg and Varennes was a difficult decision, but due to the reduction in industry demand and extreme energy and production costs, the decision was necessary," said Philippe Raynaud de Fitte, general manager, Dow Emulsion Polymers. "We believe we can better service the North American customer base by leveraging alternative manufacturing facilities and reduce overall structural costs by idling these locations".
Both plants will be fully idled by year end 2008. Beyond that timeframe, Dow will supply latex from other manufacturing locations across its grid in North America to service customer demand. Since Dow customers are served from a multiple manufacturing grid system rather than from individual sites, Dow anticipates no disruption in supply.
The Pittsburg and Varennes sites are the third and fourth latex sites to be idled by Dow in the past seven months. Dow announced the closure of its latex plant in Freeport, Texas in December last year and last week announced that its King's Lynn, UK plant would be idled by September 2008.
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