Antonio di Nunzio has long experience in the most sophisticated formaldehyde and resin production processes. The company, which he founded in 1977, has been responsible for the construction of complete factories around the world and in most cases starts with a blank sheet of paper.
His company, Mapco Engineering, is headquartered in an office block in the centre of Milan from which there is no sign of any kind of industrialisation at all.
That is not surprising when you understand that Mapco does not itself manufacture anything, but sub-contracts all manufacturing to carefully selected companies on the basis of very detailed specifications according to the strictest codes and norms.
What the company does do is to undertake turnkey contracts starting from that blank sheet of paper and, using its experience, together with some very sophisticated CAD 3-D computer programs, design and supervise the construction of highly developed formaldehyde and resin plants.
Talking to Mr di Nunzio, it becomes clear that he attaches enormous importance to the norms and regulations with which a resin plant must comply if it is to operate safely and efficiently.
Every component part of a formaldehyde and resin plant is carefully tracked during construction and that can mean anything up to 3,500 items – or more – each having its own paper trail to ensure that the finished plant starts up, and keeps running, free of problems or accidents. That could mean 50,000 pages of documentation in total for a project.
Mr di Nunzio claims that no other company offers this kind of service. “It is very simple to produce formaldehyde,” he says.
“The problem begins when you want to produce it at low cost and high levels of quality and safety. Our background and our computer programs enable us to do just that.”
The regulations governing such plants have moved on a lot in recent years and he claims there are now a number of plants in operation around the world that do not meet the current environmental or safety norms.
“In western Europe and North America today it is not possible to construct a formaldehyde plant that does not meet these norms, but in some parts of the world there are no norms to meet,” laments Mr di Nunzio.
“However, there are still some older plants in Europe that are not up to standard and, even up to a year ago, there was one in western Europe still producing formaldehyde without treatment of the waste gases.”
In most cases, he says, it is not possible to upgrade these old plants because it is uneconomic – you need to rebuild the complete plant.
“The future for Mapco is bright because of our specialisation in formaldehyde and resin plants and the fact that we are able to meet all the standards at a lower cost than many of our competitors,” he says.
But Mr di Nunzio does not mean that he cuts costs by saving on materials: “You have to use good quality material, good quality construction, everything – and that’s where we come in. We cannot supply to any company that doesn’t want to meet the norms but, if it does want to meet them, we can offer cost-effective, quality equipment. Another advantage for us is that many of our competitors are big companies and are thus much slower to react than we are.
“Although Mapco Engineering sub-contracts its fabrication, we buy all the materials and we buy the man-hours of specialists, but we don’t pay the margins of middlemen,” adds the chief executive.
For the panel industry, Mapco finds an increasing tendency for mills to build their own resin plant on site, particularly outside western Europe, where there may well be a low concentration of panel mills and so the nearest resin plant may be a long way away. The company then designs and builds a resin plant to match the output of the panel mill.
“For instance we built a plant in Cameroon of only 10,000 tonnes per year,” says Mr di Nunzio. “That is very small but then their nearest resin supplier was in Europe!”
The largest and most fully automated plant built to date by Mapco was 150,000 tonnes per annum (tpa) of resin.
“We are relatively small but very specialised in what we do,” he says.
The company’s main market is in the continent of Europe, but it does have a representative in Beijing for the Chinese market and is considering exhibiting at fairs in that country.
The main material for the production of formaldehyde resins is, of course, methanol and this always seems to be an unstable market, but Mr di Nunzio sees a change on the way.
“The methanol market is very cyclical, with prices going up and down, but the average price has been increasing over the years.
“You need a very big plant to produce methanol economically, because it is a commodity market and today the plant capacities are up to two million tpa and the overall number of plants is reducing as individual plants get bigger.”
However, another product reliant on methanol is MTBE, which takes about 40% of the production and Mr di Nunzio predicts that, if consumption of MTBE goes down, the price of methanol will fall. “Currently, California is having some problems with pollution of ground water and it looks as if some plants there may close.”
In conclusion, Mr di Nunzio returns to his strong theme of the importance of meeting norms.
“If you respect the norms, you are sure that the life of the equipment meets the requirements and that maintenance costs will be low. For example if the pump lasts longer, the amortisation cost is low. This is just one benefit of constructing a plant ‘properly’,” he says.