All wrapped up in Tyvek Local plant makes most of North America's HomeWrap

By John Reid Blackwell

That may be the most visible application for Tyvek, a material invented by DuPont and used in construction to keep water out of buildings while allowing moisture vapor to escape from inside.

The source of almost all Tyvek in North America is DuPont's Spruance plant off Jefferson Davis Highway. The Wilmington, Del.-based company has expanded production at the plant in recent years as annual sales of Tyvek surpassed $1 billion.

More investments could come in the next few years, despite a housing market downturn that has hurt sales. DuPont, facing increasing competition, is constantly promoting new applications for the material, which is used in products from sterile packaging to protective garments. Even tags on some clothing are made of Tyvek.

The company has latched onto the push for energy savings as well, promoting the material as a way to reduce energy costs.

Since DuPont introduced Tyvek HomeWrap in 1979, the product has been installed in about 5 million homes, said James Katsaros, who leads product development efforts in the company's building innovations business.

"You can wrap the world roughly 20 times over with all the house wrap we have produced for buildings," he said.

Two years ago, with home construction booming, DuPont announced a $25.5 million investment at Spruance to expand its production capacity for the protective material.

Managers in DuPont's Tyvek business say sales have dropped as the housing market has slowed, but not enough to crimp their expectations for long-term business growth -- or the possibility of new investments and job creation.

"We are not growing as fast as we would like as a result" [of the housing slowdown], said Joseph A. King Jr., global technical manager for DuPont's building innovations business. Sales are linked to housing starts, which were down about 25 percent overall last year. "But we are not down as much as the market is," King said.

The company does not break its sales results down into specific products, but managers say Tyvek sales are roughly one-third in buildings, one-third in garments and one-third in other products.

Even with the housing slowdown, the company's production lines are still close to full capacity, and DuPont is considering options for building new capacity. "Somewhere, in the next five or six years, we will need to build new capacity," said Robert Matheson Jr., a technical manager at the Spruance site.

An expansion could come in Richmond, where about 600 people work in Tyvek production and another 100 in product development, but DuPont also operates a plant in Luxembourg that makes Tyvek. China and Southeast Asia also are growing markets.

Tyvek's sales are helped by changes in building codes and construction standards that require better energy efficiency in buildings. At the same time, the company is working on new uses for Tyvek, which was introduced in 1967.

Since then, DuPont has built markets for Tyvek in a cornucopia of applications, including envelopes, medical and sterile packaging, protective garments, tags, signs and banners, and car covers.

"For 41 years, it has gone into thousands and thousands of small and niche applications, and it takes constant effort to uncover those," Matheson said.

Tyvek sales for packaging are growing, he said. The product is popular for envelopes and packages because it does not tear easily and is resistant to water.

"There is a growing demand for some very strange things such as mulch for orange trees," Matheson said. "You can actually ripen oranges faster when you use mulch made out of Tyvek, because it reflects the light back," he said.

Demand for protective apparel has helped boost Tyvek, in much the same way DuPont has seen demand grow for other high-performance materials manufactured at Spruance such as bullet-resistant Kevlar and flame-resistant Nomex. The SARS outbreak in China, for example, helped create demand for protective clothing for medical and emergency responders.

"It is unfortunate but true, our business does really well when the world is having problems," King said. Tyvek is part of DuPont's safety and protection business unit, which includes Kevlar and Nomex and had sales of about $5.6 billion last year.

In the construction market, DuPont is pushing energy efficiency as an application for Tyvek. The company has developed ways of wrapping window frames and doors with Tyvek to prevent air from escaping. Standards adopted by the 2006 International Code Committee require the use of more moisture control products in housing construction.

"The building industry needs to have better performance in energy efficiency as well as moisture management," Katsaros said. "Construction accounts for about a third of the energy that we use in this country, so if we make our buildings more energy efficient that will greatly reduce our consumption of energy."

Those changes mean that Tyvek is seeing more competition from other producers. At least 50 types of home-wrap products compete with Tyvek, some from manufacturers in China.

"When I started here five years ago, there were maybe 10 or 12," King said. "Because of this code change, it has brought in everybody. Globalization is a great thing, but it makes for more competitors globally, too."

Tyvek's managers say the product enjoys the benefits of brand recognition, as well as superior quality to new competitors, which often use multiple layers of material to achieve the same results as Tyvek in one layer. "We are still the leader," King said.

Republished with permission from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 12, 2008.