Birla Carbon Launches New Production Line in Italy to Mass-Produce Sustainable Carbon Black Materials

During Shell's Q4 2025 earnings call with analysts on February 5th, CEO Wael Sawan stated that Shell's loss-making chemicals business "has not met expectations" and the company is "actively assessing the situation and considering the phased shutdown of some of our production units." In FY2025, Shell's chemicals business posted adjusted losses of $1.12 billion, marking the sixth consecutive quarter of adjusted losses, with Q4 losses reaching $589 million. The company noted that lower chemicals margins led to a $604 million year-over-year decrease in adjusted earnings and a $263 million decrease in adjusted earnings in the fourth quarter.

In February 2026, Birla Carbon inaugurated a new post-processing and packaging line for Continua™ Sustainable Carbonaceous Material (SCM) at its carbon black plant in Trecate, Italy. The feedstock for this material is sourced from waste tires processed at Circtec’s pyrolysis plant in the Netherlands, enabling large-scale supply. This move marks a critical step toward the company’s goal of recycling 300,000 tonnes of end-of-life tires annually by 2030, aiming to provide global customers with stable and eco-friendly alternative carbon black solutions.

Recently, the Spanish plastics industry organization EsPlasticos issued a warning stating that the Spanish and even European plastics value chains are rapidly losing competitiveness due to multiple factors. The organization pointed out that the EU's share in global plastic raw material production has dropped from 22% in 2006 to 12% in 2024, while Asia accounts for 57.2%. During the same period, the revenue of the European plastics value chain decreased by 13% from 457 billion euros in 2022 to 389 billion euros in 2024.

Elon Musk has just promoted an alumnus of Wuhan University of Technology. According to Tsla Archive on social media platform X, Tesla's FSD software head, Phil Duan, has been promoted to Director of Autopilot Engineering at Tesla. This is noteworthy due to the special timing, with Tesla Robotaxi having just launched fully driverless operations. It's also significant because of the specific individual promoted—this key figure in Tesla Robotaxi has been with Tesla for 9 years and, prior to his promotion, was the company's principal software engineer and the leader of FSD V14 development. Furthermore, in a widely circulated photo of the Tesla AI team, he was the Chinese individual taking the photo from the "center" position.

Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange (ZCE) caustic soda main contract fell more than 2%, to 1923 yuan/ton. Dalian Commodity Exchange (DCE) plastic main contract fell more than 2%, to 6763 yuan/ton.