Type | Besloten Vennootschap |
---|---|
Industry | Chemical |
Founded | Vlissingen, Netherlands |
Fate | Bankrupt |
Headquarters | , |
Key people | Rob de Ruiter (Managing director) |
Products | Phosphorus Compounds |
Number of employees | about 450 (end 2012) [1] |
Website | http://www.thermphos.com/ |
The Thermphos International B.V. was a venture of the chemical industry, which produced phosphorus and inorganic phosphorus compounds. In 2005 it earned about 550 Million Euros and employed about 1200 people. It was Europe's only producer of elemental phosphorus. [2] The company was also involved in recycling phosphorus. [3] It used to be a former affiliate of the German chemicals company Hoechst AG and was taken over in 2003 by a group of private investors, led by the Italian-Israeli businessman Nahum Galmor. [4]
The headquarters of the venture was in Vlissingen (in the Netherlands), with supporting production centres in Europe, Asia, and South America.
In North America, the company operates a sales center in Anniston, Alabama and Mattawan, Canada. [5]
Worldwide, the company has 16 daughter corporations:
Thermphos products center around phosphorus and phosphates. This ranges from elemental phosphorus to base chemicals of phosphate chemistry, such as phosphoric Acid and polyphosphoric acid, phosphorus trichloride, phosphorus oxychloride, phosphorus pentachloride, phosphorus pentoxide, phosphorus pentasulfide, aluminium phosphate, calcium phosphate, ammonium phosphate, potassium phosphate, and sodium phosphate, as well as other additives for plastics and ceramics as well as food industries. Phosphorus is one of the three main nutrients present in fertilizer.
In September 2010 the Public Health authorities of The Netherlands (VROM) issued an ultimatum on the Thermphos Industrial Park Vlissingen because of enduring severe environmental and safety problems related to emission of and exposure to cadmium and dioxine. If these problems were not solved quickly, VROM said, the factory must be closed. [6]
On November 21, 2012, the district court of Breda declared the company bankrupt. [7]
Phosphorus is a chemical element with the symbol P and atomic number 15. Elemental phosphorus exists in two major forms, white phosphorus and red phosphorus, but because it is highly reactive, phosphorus is never found as a free element on Earth. It has a concentration in the Earth's crust of about one gram per kilogram. In minerals, phosphorus generally occurs as phosphate.
In chemistry, a phosphate is an anion, salt, functional group or ester derived from a phosphoric acid. It most commonly means orthophosphate, a derivative of orthophosphoric acid H
3PO
4.
Phosphoric acid is a colorless, odorless phosphorus-containing solid, and inorganic compound with the chemical formula H3PO4. It is commonly encountered as an 85% aqueous solution, which is a colourless, odourless, and non-volatile syrupy liquid. It is a major industrial chemical, being a component of many fertilizers.
A period 3 element is one of the chemical elements in the third row of the periodic table of the chemical elements. The periodic table is laid out in rows to illustrate recurring (periodic) trends in the chemical behaviour of the elements as their atomic number increases: a new row is begun when the periodic table skips a row and a chemical behaviour begins to repeat, meaning that elements with similar behaviour fall into the same vertical columns. The third period contains eight elements: sodium, magnesium, aluminium, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, chlorine, and argon. The first two, sodium and magnesium, are members of the s-block of the periodic table, while the others are members of the p-block. All of the period 3 elements occur in nature and have at least one stable isotope.
Polyphosphates are salts or esters of polymeric oxyanions formed from tetrahedral PO4 (phosphate) structural units linked together by sharing oxygen atoms. Polyphosphates can adopt linear or a cyclic ring structures. In biology, the polyphosphate esters ADP and ATP are involved in energy storage. A variety of polyphosphates find application in mineral sequestration in municipal waters, generally being present at 1 to 5 ppm. GTP, CTP, and UTP are also nucleotides important in the protein synthesis, lipid synthesis, and carbohydrate metabolism, respectively. Polyphosphates are also used as food additives, marked E452.
Sodium hexametaphosphate (SHMP) is a salt of composition Na6[(PO3)6]. Sodium hexametaphosphate of commerce is typically a mixture of metaphosphates (empirical formula: NaPO3), of which the hexamer is one, and is usually the compound referred to by this name. Such a mixture is more correctly termed sodium polymetaphosphate. They are white solids that dissolve in water.
Parathion, also called parathion-ethyl or diethyl parathion and locally known as "Folidol", is an organophosphate insecticide and acaricide. It was originally developed by IG Farben in the 1940s. It is highly toxic to non-target organisms, including humans, so its use has been banned or restricted in most countries. The basic structure is shared by parathion methyl.
Hypophosphorous acid (HPA), or phosphinic acid, is a phosphorus oxyacid and a powerful reducing agent with molecular formula H3PO2. It is a colorless low-melting compound, which is soluble in water, dioxane and alcohols. The formula for this acid is generally written H3PO2, but a more descriptive presentation is HOP(O)H2, which highlights its monoprotic character. Salts derived from this acid are called hypophosphites.
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Nahum Galmor is an Italian-Israeli industrialist residing in Switzerland. He has been the owner and chairman of the board of the Dutch company Thermphos since 2003.
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