Acquisitions, expansions.

U.S. Rubber Recycling acquired the assets of Rancho Cucamonga, CA-based Advanced Floor Company (Adflo International), and will continue to provide the company's flooring products made from recycled bus and truck tires. U.S. Rubber Recycling retained all of Adflo's original management staff and added a vice president of sales and marketing. U.S. Rubber Recycling produces a line of recycled mat products, using discarded tires, for home and industrial use.

M.A. Hanna reached a preliminary agreement to acquire the engineered materials division of Cookson America, based in Providence, RI, for an undisclosed amount. The division is made up of Monmouth Plastics in Asbury Park, NJ, which is involved in flame retardant polyolefins, and Texapol, in Bethlehem, PA, a producer of plastics compounds based on engineering thermoplastics. Still subject to approvals by the Cookson and Hanna boards of directors, the acquisition is anticipated to close at the end of the first quarter of 1993. The acquisition will improve Hanna's position in specialty compounding and expand its technology base with addition of higher performance thermoplastics.

GLS Plastics completed the second phase of a multi-step growth plan with a 25,000 square foot expansion at its research and application development center and production facilities in Cary, IL. The expansion allows GLS to increase capacity for application development and shorten lead time for production and delivery of new TPEs.

Akzo's polymer chemicals business unit is building a multi-million dollar manufacturing plant at its Pasadena, TX site, incorporating advanced safety technology and statistical quality control, and devoted to organic peroxides used in the crosslinking of synthetic rubber. The plant will be a multi-purpose liquids unit designed to produce selected dialkyl peroxides, peroxyketals, specialty peroxyesters (t-butyl, t-amyl and trimethylpentyl products) and hydroperoxides. Construction will begin in the first quarter of 1993, with mechanical completion estimated in the fourth quarter of 1994.

Dow Plastics revealed plans to boost production of polymers based on Insite technology, a catalyst and manufacturing process that produces new families of polymers, known as polyolefin plastomers and polyolefin elastomers. Dow began an on-going 30-day, one million pound production run of polymers based on the technology, with plans to scale-up production to 50 million pounds by 1993. During the 30-day run, Dow will make market development quantities of the polymers.

Norton Performance Plastics of Wayne, NJ, opened a $10 million, wholly-owned manufacturing plant at Haramura in the Nagano Prefecture, Japan to produce its foam sealants, fluoropolymer bearings and Tygon tubing. Creating more than 100 new jobs, the plant houses slitting, diecutting, extrusion, compounding and precision forming equipment. Norton also set up its own U.S. style distributor network.

MG Industries, a member of the Hoechst Group involved in industrial gases and gas technology, added three U.S. facilities: An administrative operations headquarters in Fairless Hills, PA, to house the Specialty Gases group; a technical center in St. Charles, MO; and corporate offices in Malvern, PA.