Comment

In a new report on expansions being made at its Termoli, Italy, plant, Union Carbide states that when it began to develop organofunctional silanes more than three decades ago, the economic climate in the world had not yet made petrochemical resins so expensive. But even then, industry found it attractive to replace high‐cost engineering plastics with lower‐cost resins, equal in properties when reinforced with glass fibres or minerals, thanks to silanes. Since then, company research has developed silanes that can cross‐link polymers, giving them new and even better properties.