At the event, the Brazilian company will present to the Amsterdam ArenA the first seat made of Green Plastic, nicknamed the "sugar seat"
Braskem will participate in the inauguration, on May 26, of the Brazilian Football Cafe Skylounge at the Amsterdam ArenA. At the event, Braskem will symbolically deliver the first "sugar seat", which is the nickname coined in the Netherlands for the stadium seats made of Green Plastic, which is derived from sugarcane ethanol, a 100% renewable raw material. Braskem, which manufactures the biopolymer, will initially supply enough resin to the multifunctional Dutch stadium to make 2,000 seats. Eventually, after a two-year period, all 54,000 seats will be made from Green Plastic.
The Brazilian Football Cafe is a special theme bar inspired on the world view of Brazil as a nation identified with football (aka soccer), which will showcase its culture, gastronomy, music and an exclusive collection of Brazilian football memories. Participants already confirmed for the event include Prince Maurits van Orange-Nassau, Brazil's ambassador to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, José Artur Denot Medeiros, and former Brazilian footballer Carlos Alberto Torres, who was captain of the Brazilian national team that won the country's third World Cup title in 1970 and is the ambassador to the Brazilian Football Cafe.
Braskem, which is the leading producer of thermoplastic resins in the Americas and world's largest producer of biopolymers, formed a partnership with the Amsterdam ArenA in late 2011 to supply its Green Plastic resin to make all the stadium's seats. Visitors to the space will be able to see firsthand the stadium's use of plastic made from renewable resources, since the seat and other products made from this raw material will be on display during the year.
Installing "sugar seats" is part of the strategy to make the Amsterdam ArenA the calling card of the world's most sustainable capital city. The stadium was inaugurated in August 1996 and is undergoing works to modernize and improve areas open to the public. All the works are being designed and executed in accordance with sustainability principles. By 2015, the stadium will be ecologically neutral and have zero carbon emissions.
Braskem began making Green Plastic on an industrial scale in September 2010, when it inaugurated, in Triunfo, Rio Grande do Sul, the world's largest industrial plant making ethanol-based ethylene, which has green polyethylene production capacity of 200 kton/year. In addition to the traditional advantages of plastic made from fossil-based resources, Green Plastic offer a positive environmental balance, since it removes 2.5 tons of carbon gas (CO2) from the atmosphere for every ton produced.