PLANT LOCATION AND DESIGN ASSIGNMENT

Plant Location and Design Assignment

Plant Location and Design Assignment

Assessment of Plant Location

In determining what to do with the new plant, the Refurb Ltd team needed to consider a number of peripheral factors. Despite the fact that the new plant continued to be a chronic money-loser, it provided important support for Union Carbide's Research and Development Center, located just south of New. This center was created to allow discovery and testing of pesticides under tropical conditions. The New plant's existence and its safety was important to the center. As one scientist mentioned:

The advantage of having the plant was that we were constantly forced to think in commercial terms. We were in constant touch with the production people there. Without it, we may be reduced to mere academics like numerous government research institutions-doing work without thought to applicability.

In addition, Refurb Ltd had to consider the potential development of a new population around any plant that was built in UK. According to one Union Carbide official, "In UK, land is scarce, and the population often gravitates toward areas that contain manufacturing facilities."8 Proportionally more money and attention in UK was applied to urban industrialization than to rural development. As a result, urban areas had to cope with mass migrations as people heard about the possibility of new jobs. As more people migrated to the city, slums and shantytowns cropped up, often close to industrial plants. In fact, the two neighborhoods of temporary huts and shelters built across the street from the new plant were not zoned for residential use.

Therefore, by choosing this site-a site that would inevitably be surrounded by people-Refurb Ltd needed to place even greater importance on the development of safety systems that could be trusted at all times. If Refurb Ltd decided to produce MIC, the company needed to reevaluate whether the city of New itself was a good location for such a high tech plant.

The assessment identified numerous benefits associated with the New plant location.

New was better prepared to handle a chemical plant than anywhere else in the Madhya Pradesh province and most other places in UK. The local technical institutions produced a large pool of skilled labor that would require only basic maintenance training sessions, should the company choose to invest a portion of its budget into such training.

Despite Union Carbide's 30 years of experience with MIC, much about the chemical remained unknown. Since MIC was so dangerous and volatile, researchers in general were reluctant to work with it, and consequently very little were known about the toxicological effects of the chemical.11 Chemical and Engineering News writer Michael Heylin maintained that “high reactivity and high volatility combine with high toxicity to make MIC a far from easy chemical to handle.”12 For this reason, other companies that manufactured MIC, such as the German company, Bayer, tried to use as little MIC as possible, and they reduced the amount of time it was held in storage.

The original production method involved the production of Sevin without using MIC ...