10/3/2023 0 Comments Country vinyl records![]() Once PVC has been synthesised from its component chemicals, the raw resin is then mixed with a variety of additives, heated to form a molten plastic compound, forced like spaghetti strands through a die and chopped into pellets. If you have ever rolled Play-Doh in your hands, placed it in one end of a garlic-press-like gadget and squeezed it out the other, then you know how PVC compound is made. ‘Toxic hotspot’ … the Map Ta Phut industrial estate in Rayong. ![]() But the basic principles are easy to imagine. There are numerous phases, a campus of buildings, tall silos, deep vats, busy machines, as well as many workers in hardhats, hairnets and safety glasses. The process of producing PVC compound is complicated. Instead, a representative from SCG Chemicals – TPC’s parent corporation and one of the largest petrochemical manufacturers in Asia – agreed to meet at my hotel to discuss their business and to explain how vinyl is made. ![]() Unsurprisingly, security was tight at the TPC facility, and guards refused me at the gate I never saw inside or had contact with TPC representatives. But he knew one thing for sure: TPC was not going to let me see how PVC is made. He was surprised when I told him not only that vinyl record sales had been increasing since 2005 but that the recording industry still used what he saw as a grimy and outmoded material. After a year of unanswered emails and weeks of being hung-up on, I finally got a tentative invitation to tour TPC’s facilities and boarded the next flight to Thailand.īy coincidence, the first person I met in Bangkok was a retired Belgian petrochemical engineer. TPC makes this specialised vinyl on the banks of the Chao Phraya river, about a half-hour’s drive south of the capital. Tight security … Thai Plastic and Chemicals, south of Bangkok. There are containers called hoppers at each pressing station, brimming with the lentil-like polymer pellets that get funnelled down into the machinery, heated and fused to form larger biscuits that resemble hockey pucks, and squashed to make records. So, if you’re one of the millions of people to re-embrace vinyl records, it’s worth knowing where they come from and how they’re made. While it is far exceeded by revenues from streaming, the vinyl market keeps growing – Americans now spend as much on vinyl as they do on CDs, while there were 4.3m vinyl sales in the UK last year, the 12th consecutive year of growth. The basic technological principles of record pressing have not changed for a century, and the machines themselves are decades old. These contraptions fill the building, as long as a city block, with hissing and clanking as well as the sweet-and-sour notes of warm grease and melted plastic. Inside a US vinyl pressing plant – its owners have asked that I do not give its location – dozens of hydraulic machines run all day and night.
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