Covestro has broken ground for an expansion of its specialty polycarbonate film production at Dormagen, Germany.  The investment, which includes new co-extrusion lines, is part of the German engineering plastics producer’s plan to upgrade and expand production worldwide in response to increasing demand.

Altogether, the Leverkusen-based former Bayer MaterialScience is spending €100 million on the films expansion, for which it has not provided capacity figures.

In a first move, capacity at its South Deerfield, Massachusetts site in the US was expanded last year. At the beginning of 2019, Covestro began construction on a new PC films line at Map Ta Phut, Thailand. At Guangzhou, China, the company is in the process of converting a co-extrusion line with an eye toward a capacity buildup.

Alongside the capacity expansion, managing board member Klaus Schäfer said Covestro is establishing its Dormagen site as a competence center for specialty films. Currently, the site houses production, a technical center for film processing, a showroom and research laboratories.

The company also has competence centers for PC films at two other two German sites, Leverkusen and Bomlitz, which specialize in film coating and thermoplastic elastomer films. Key applications for the multi-layer PC flat films are in automotive interiors as well as medical devices and identity cards.