From: Plastics News

Dow Chemical Co. has launched Innate — a line of packaging resins that company officials said is unmatched in stiffness-toughness balance.

Initial applications for Dow's new Innate LLDPE resins include flexible food packaging.

Innate is Dow’s first major product launch since it unveiled Intune — a polypropylene-based olefin block copolymer — at the K 2013 trade show in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Midland, Mich.-based Dow first commercialized the new Innate linear low density polyethylene resins at some accounts in September, and now is producing them at sites in North America and Europe.

“This has brought great excitement for us and the total value chain,” said Diego Donoso, Dow’s packaging and specialty plastics business president, in an Oct. 26 phone interview. “We were asking what the next thing was for us to deliver to our customers. We said it had to open up new opportunities and allow them more creative freedom.”

Packaging and specialty plastics global R&D director David Parrillo added that Innate “delivers a breakthrough that’s complementary to our portfolio — it’s more of a new platform than new grades.”

Initial applications for Innate include flexible food packaging and heavy-duty industrial shipping sacks. The materials offer twice the abuse resistance in coextruded films vs. standard PE resins, officials said.

Officials declined to say what type of catalyst technology is used to make Innate resins. Dow previously has made specialty PE resins based on single-site catalysts.

The new materials also offer lightweighting opportunities that will help customers in their drive for sustainable packaging, officials said.

Innate also gives Dow — a global PE leader — a new product to promote as the firm is bringing on large amounts of new PE capacity in Saudi Arabia through its Sadara joint venture and at its major U.S. Gulf Coast complex in Freeport, Texas. More than 2 billion pounds of new PE capacity is set to come onstream in Freeport in mid-2017.

Dow is a global plastics and chemicals leader that employs 53,000 worldwide. The firm posted sales of more than $58 billion in 2014.