A clear goodbye
Farewell, my friends! With this long and boring page, including a few free-of-charge grammar errors, I want to thank you for more than 20 years of opportunities to grow together: the ADG Polymer Solutions VAT number is now closed.
There are several reasons behind my decision. First of all, my company, LMS, has beaten its business-volume record for the third year in a row, and 2024 luckily started like a cannonball. Anyway, it is a small pig house, a very small one, so my time is limited. My own company is now absorbing almost all of me, leaving very little for yours. My family is also growing, and I am getting older: my exothermal curve has passed its peak, and I am no longer the ping-pong ball that most of you knew bouncing around your reactor rooms.
There are a few more reasons. I have always, proudly, followed my number-one rule: no technology sold farther east than the West. Since our politicians, with a small contribution from a lazy Swedish girl who went to New York sailing on 40 tons of polystyrene to save CO2, decided that plastic is evil, the number of customers to whom I can offer my services in the West has been reducing year after year. This will not have a happy ending for us, but I am still a European citizen and a proud patriot.
My second, well-known and appreciated, business rule says: what I see in your plant I will not disclose to the next customer. Sounds strange from an Italian? Yes, I know. This has had a negative effect on my pockets: some people engaged me simply to learn what competitors were developing, and for the ones who know me, this did not bring me new coins.
The third rule leading my last years with you was: my way or the highway. This reduced even further the number of partners willing to question their sometimes Jurassic methods. There are few certainties on planet Earth; one of them is my complete inability to shut up. If there is one lesson I learned in these years, it is that, often, to remove failures in a cast slab, you need to change just one chemical: the brain.
Unfortunately, some, not all, of my old predictions, shared with you between a load of MMA and an after-work beer, are now becoming sadly true. People who refused to innovate are turning from cast companies into resellers of something produced elsewhere, with no environmental care, no human-rights care and, most of all, no quality. This is the final swan song; they probably know it, and this makes me very sad for the wonderful people employed there.
I offered truly next-generation polymers, including IR-shielding materials, nano-charged photovoltaic collectors and low-polymerization strategies that can save gigawatts of energy to produce better cast sheets in less time, giving plastic a real green flag. I offered them to people who simply did not believe there was a market for specialties. I often heard from some of you that I should keep it K.I.S.S., keep it stupid and simple. That mantra worked in the 80s. I now believe it will no longer work here, and maybe only for a little while longer elsewhere.
The big players in this market, and I bet Otto and friends are rolling in their graves, are now headed by funds and financially minded investors. These people look at PMMA through a row in an Excel file. Entrepreneurship is another story entirely. They close a plant that can produce diamonds out of methyl methacrylate because energy costs grew 3.6% more than predicted. Shame on you.
Small producers are often strangled by unfair competition from their own cheap drug dealer. They buy their own poison from people who are not able to take care of their own environment, thinking this will ease their pain and give them another 12 to 24 months. It will not. Your sweat might, but maybe now it is too late to understand.
The last reason for me to quit was that, in recent years, instead of innovating, most of us decided to buy a big can of green paint and rebrand our companies with credible, appealing and working, but senseless, green slogans. A petrochemical compound becomes green acrylic for the benefit of some brainless marketing director who owns a Tesla and thinks he is saving the planet. Another way to make it stupid and simple: dear customer, if you buy this, you save turtles.
I am honestly and truly happy that this green bullshit seems to work well for those who decided to adopt this winning commercial strategy. I admire your cleverness. In the end, the world is full of brainless people who, for some reason, need acrylic panels; so why not give them the idea that, by buying some oil-based plastic, they are doing something for the planet?
Who still remains, then? You, my friends. You were able to spend your money on a bite of my ideas and, sometimes quickly, sometimes later, and sometimes sadly never, put my seeds to fruit. Sometimes we got blooms and sometimes just weeds, but every time I truly had fun with you. Thank you.
Acrylic windows started their route by saving the lives of pilots during World War II, even if they were the wrong ones. PMMA is the raw material of bone cement, keeping people alive and standing; it gives blind people the possibility to see again; it is one of the few truly biocompatible polymers, and it is so beautiful. When you see the first ghosts appearing in a beaker under stirring soon after the initiator falls in, because of the different refractive index of the PMMA/MMA mixture, when this devil starts to boil and then calms down again, becoming so transparent and beautiful in the mold, you understand it. It is one of the very few polymers that can be customized in batches of 1 kg with colors, particles, effects, embedments and properties. I love it.
Some of you, most of you, share this love. In my small pig house we are cooking some new specialties. We will try to sell some of them; others will remain transparent seeds. They are no longer for sale, but if you offer friendship, you will have a bite for free.
I want to thank everyone for the opportunity, but some of you made a breach in my heart, so I will try to mention you here: Gilles, Damien, Jacques, Sasha, Martin, Frank, Franco, Didier, Gertrude, Massimo, Marco, Maria Savina, Samuele, Alessandro, Domenico, Valentine, Denis, Alenka, Jasmina, Fabian, Eyal, Igal, Bojan, Sergio, Oscar, Emanuele, Luc, Luca, Marcelo, Guido, Paolo, Paul, Paulina, Monja, Klaus and Hans. I am sure I forgot someone, and I am sorry.
This website will stay alive, my mobile number is always the same and, if you want to reach me, just do it. Ciao! Antonio