OT - 20th birthday of CD approaching
(from my company newsletter):
The following is an excerpt from a news release issued earlier today from Leverkusen.
20 years of audio CDs:
An electronic storage marvel – thanks to modern polymers
For decades the black vinyl disc offered the ultimate in listening pleasure for music-lovers. Then came the revolution: exactly 20 years ago the first CD appeared, instantly redefining the concept of sound quality, and ushering in a new era of electronic storage media. Today in addition to music, video clips, computer programs and games and all kinds of other data are stored on the tiny silver discs.
25 billion discs were manufactured in 2001 alone. Even more impressive is the total figure for global production of optical data storage media from the early days in 1982 up to and including 2001, which comes to more than 110 billion units. Bayer AG is one of the leading manufacturers of the polycarbonate that is used to make optical data storage media, as well as a host of other products. It is due in no small measure to the constant improvements made to this material that the storage capacity of optical data carriers continues to increase.
The shiny plastic disc we call the CD weighs a mere 16 grams, is 1.2 millimeters thick and 12 centimeters in diameter. According to popular legend, this particular diameter was chosen because the conductor Herbert von Karajan begged his record company during the early days of CD development to create sufficient storage capacity so that the whole of his favorite piece of music – Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – would fit onto one disc. With the technology available at that time, this necessitated a diameter of 12 centimeters, which remains the global standard for CDs to this day.
Of the 1.9 million tons of polycarbonate used for manufacturing in 2001, 22 percent or 430,000 tons went into optical storage media – the second most important field of use for this high-performance resin after the electrical engineering and electronics sectors. “Approximately one third of all optical storage media in use around the world are made from our Makrolon®,” commented Dr. Jürgen Dahmer, head of Bayer's Plastics Business Group, before an audience of some 70 journalists from ten European countries at a press conference held in Hanover to mark the 20th birthday of the audio CD. “In Europe, Makrolon is the number one material for this application by a long way,” he added.
“Optical storage media are no longer just audio CDs,” added Dahmer. “The market is undergoing dramatic changes. The audio CD is a fully-developed product. In 1997 recorded CDs accounted for virtually the entire music and data markets. Just 4 years later the market is now almost 3 times as large, and new storage media like recordable CDs and DVDs already have a share of almost 30 percent. According to various forecasts, the market volume will almost double again to some 800,000 tons by the year 2005. By then the front-runners will probably be recordable data media and DVDs, with the market share of audio CDs having shrunk to about 34 percent.”
Planned increase in Makrolon capacity by 2006
At the end of 2001 Bayer's annual polycarbonate production capacity amounted to more than 650,000 tons. “We believe that the demand for polycarbonate will continue to grow throughout the world,” explained Dahmer, “and are consequently planning a general increase in production capacity for Makrolon, probably concentrated in Asia. We are investing primarily in Map Ta Phut in Thailand and the new Caojing site near Shanghai in China, and expect our global production capacity for Makrolon to increase to more than 1.1 million metric tons by 2006.”
The first audio CD was produced on August 17, 1982
It was on August 17, 1982 that PolyGram produced the world’s first mass-produced audio CD containing classical music: Claudio Arrau’s rendition on the piano of various waltzes by Frederic Chopin.
Bayer developed the technology for these compact discs together with Philips and PolyGram. A specially customized Makrolon polycarbonate was the plastic starting material, which – having been modified a number of times – still serves as the base material for all electronic storage media today.
The successor to PolyGram is the Universal Manufacturing & Logistics company, part of the French-American Vivendi Universal Group, whose factory in Langenhagen near Hanover manufactures around 750,000 mainly audio CDs per day. “The growth in CD production since 1982 has far exceeded even the wildest expectations from back then,” Dr. Bodo Wiechmann, Managing Director, Production of Universal Manufacturing & Logistics, told the assembled journalists. “Over the last ten years the average annual growth rate has been around 34 percent,” added Wiechmann.
Growth in production at Universal in Hanover has been equally dramatic: starting with just 376,000 discs in 1982, production of CDs reached some 160 million last year. “In total we have manufactured over 1.8 billion optical data carriers since 1982,” Wiechmann declared.
Protecting the environment: CDs are too valuable to throw away
In view of the enormous quantities of Makrolon that are already used today for the manufacture of discs, the question has to be asked – what will happen to them when they have come to the end of their useful life, are damaged, or – much more importantly – are no longer in vogue? Computer magazines in particular bombard their readers with CD-ROMs whose contents soon become out of date and therefore obsolete.
In 1991 Bayer AG pioneered an industrial-scale chemical recycling process for CDs made from its Makrolon polycarbonate. For many years, the plant built at Bayer’s site in Dormagen in 1994 with a recycling capacity of about 6,000 metric tons was unique throughout Europe. Thousands of tons of polycarbonate have been processed to yield a granulate that can be used for new products, such as housings for printers and computers. The ISL Polymers company in Duisburg now carries out recycling using Bayer's process.
For the Universal Manufacturing & Logistics company, high-purity polycarbonate is also a valuable raw material. With umpteen thousand CDs produced each day there are substantial amounts of sprue waste as well as the occasional reject. Stock taken back from the market is also recycled internally. Using a special mechanical stripping process it is possible to recover up to 13.5 grams of polycarbonate from an original CD weighing approximately 16 grams – about 85 percent. To ensure that the quality and purity meet the stringent demands of Universal and its customers, only CDs from the company's own manufacturing plant in Hanover are recycled. “In 2001, the total was around 300 metric tons,” stated Wiechmann.
The DVD – ongoing development
The market launch of the DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) in 1996 marked a new leap forward in technology. The production of this new data carrier with even smaller pit structures presented polycarbonate manufacturers with a major challenge. Bayer was the first to respond, and now Makrolon is the material of choice for DVDs too.
What of the future? Higher storage capacities with the same disc diameter mean smaller pit sizes and narrower track pitches. This requires new types of laser, in particular those that use shorter wavelengths. CD players have red lasers that operate at a wavelength of 780 nm, while DVD players use a shorter wavelength of 650 nm. Very small blue lasers have recently become available commercially.
This created the conditions necessary for the “Blu-ray disc“, a new standard agreed to by leading international manufacturers in February 2002. The pits and track pitch have been reduced again by a factor of around two compared with the DVD. This decrease in size means that the quality of the plastic used as a substrate assumes greater importance in order to avoid errors in readout. With the Blu-ray disc storage capacities of around 25 GB are possible.
The next generation of optical storage media currently being developed in the laboratory may even allow data to be stored directly on the surface. Coupled with opto-magnetic reading systems, this would enable hitherto undreamed-of data densities to be stored, with capacities as high as 100 GB, according to expert estimates.
“Polycarbonate, and therefore Makrolon, will continue to play an important role in optical data storage in the future because of its superior properties,” asserted Dr. Dahmer.
Click on the Makrolon logo if you'd like to learn more about this versatile Bayer product.
Forward-looking statements
This news release contains forward-looking statements based on current assumptions and forecasts made by Bayer Group management. Various known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors could lead to material differences between the actual future results, financial situation, development or performance of the company and the estimates given here. These factors include those discussed in our public reports filed with the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (including our Form 20-F). The company assumes no liability whatsoever to update these forward-looking statements or to conform them to future events or developments.
AI
