Q: Who are Siltech? Can you give us a little history lesson?
A: Siltech is a family-owned business based in Toronto, ON Canada. When we started in the early 1990s, our owners envisioned a company which manufactured and marketed our own specialty silicones. This has always been our forte and direction and we have grown dramatically since then.When I started in 2009, I was Siltech’s 42nd employee and we had one production facility in Toronto. That facility had already been expanded nearly to capacity. The next year, we bought our second plant in Mississauga, ON, doubling our staff and tripling our capacity.
In 2022, we have over 150 employees and are building our third production facility. Throughout this we have remained a great employer with a strong culture of decency and hard work. Siltech senior management believe that how you treat your employees affects how they treat the customers.
Q: What are Siltech’s customers looking for in terms of sustainable products?
A: Over my 33 years in the industry, people have often asked me for green, environmentally friendly or sustainable products. At first, they were not sure what they meant by terms like “green” or “environmentally friendly.” Today, people clearly know what they want. They want products which are not made from petroleum. This is based on the beliefs that petroleum is non-sustainable long term and that a fossil fuel economy is harmful to the Earth. This desire is often more simply stated as biologically sourced.Q: Are silicones petroleum-based or biologically derived?
A: They are not really either. The silicone-based polymer is largely derived from mineral sources with some of its mass coming from petro-chemicals. The earth’s crust is 74% silicon dioxide, which can be converted to silicon metal. That metal is reacted with methanol in an energy intensive reaction that provides the precursor blocks for all forms of silicone polymers. Today, the methanol used is petroleum derived as that is the easiest and least expensive source. But, bio-derived methanol has been used to make silicone in the past although the marketplace at that time did not respond favorably.Q: How about the modified silicones used in coatings additives? Are they different?
A: The parent silicone polymer is insoluble in nearly everything rendering it unusable in coatings. To produce effective non-problematic coatings additives, silicone is reacted with organic polymers, creating a chimera polymer with some of the properties of both precursors. The surface energy and tactile properties of the silicone married with the solubility properties of the organic polymer creates an enhanced copolymer which is suitable as a coatings additive.Typically two types of organic polymers are used to make these hybrid organo-silicone polymers: alpha olefin hydrocarbons or polyethyleneoxides. Currently, both of these organic portions of the hybrid polymers are petroleum sourced. In other words, generally speaking, silicone-based coatings additives are 1/3 to 2/3 petroleum-based and the reminder mineral-based. Siltech’s efforts to offer more sustainable coatings additives have centered on sourcing those raw material feeds with bio-derived materials.
Q: Has Siltech been successful in developing and marketing these types of bio-derived products to the coatings industry?
A: At the moment, we have only two options for hydrocarbon modified silicones. One is esterified from castor oil and the other is reacted with Eugenol. Both are derived primarily from bio-sources and Siltech is currently evaluating their effectiveness in coatings. We have sold both product types for years in other markets.For the larger family of polyethyleneoxide modified additives, a new feedstock allows us to offer commercially the Silsurf® Bio series of products in which the EO is derived from sugar or corn. We have shown that this difference in feedstocks does not alter the performance of these products and they can often be switched into existing formulations with minimal applications testing.
We have been sorting out regulatory REACh registrations and are pretty well set so these are ready for evaluation.
Q: The other relevant topic for 2022 seems to be supply and demand. How is Siltech dealing with these 2022 issues?
A: Yes, 2022 has proven to be another very unique year. Demand is very strong; strong enough that there likely would have been some transient supply problems in a normal year. But Siltech prides ourselves on keeping capacity several years ahead of demand so that we have always had the ability to supply to planned and unplanned growth.However, 2022 also brought supply chain disruptions. Silicone basic raw materials were tight for a variety of reasons before the pandemic and remained so through 2021. That has been mostly resolved albeit at higher prices. Mostly.
The bigger 2022 supply issue for Siltech has become the organic components and diluents which we use in many of our products. Obtaining some key raw materials has become the choke point in some of our products. Also the pandemic threw a giant monkey wrench into the shipping machinery which has continued into 2022. This has mostly affected Siltech in timing of raw materials.
We realized that we could not control a lot of the issues above, but we could control our own capabilities. At the end of 2021 we decided to convert both of our plants to a three shift/seven day production cycle. This adds more capacity than you first think, because reactions that take too long to finish by Friday which used to have to wait for Monday can now be started on any day of the week.
We also added third party warehouse capacity, built inventory and bought key raw materials when they were available.