Uniontown, Ohio Lions Club

A $100 million bleach manufacturing plant will be built and operated by K2 Pure Solutions at Dow Chemical Co.’s Pittsburg site.

K2 will build and operate the plant on 15 acres leased from Dow on its 513-acre east Contra Costa County site. Dow will supply raw materials.

The new plant will sell bleach mainly to municipal water treatment plants in Northern California. It should be operational by the end of 2010.

Seperately, K2 will lease to Dow an additional separate facility K2 will operate to make chlorine and caustic soda for Dow’s agricultural markets.

Howard Brodie, K2’s chief executive officer, said the 20-year agreement should provide about 200 direct and indirect construction jobs and approximately 40 direct and indirect permanent operations jobs.

Dow, the $53.5 billion chemical giant based in Midland, Mich., said Dec. 8 as part of a global reduction it would close its Pittsburg latex operation, costing 20 jobs. The latex plant had been idle since August. Dow has 500 employees and contactors in Pittsburg.

Dow has nine production units left after the latex plant shut down, said Randy Fischback, Dow’s California public and government affairs leader.

The K2 plant “will be a new unit on site; its footprint every bit as robust as our larger plants.”

Dow operated a global-scale chlorine production plant in Pittsburg for 50 years, before closing it in 1992.

The new plant will have to get city and regulatory agency approvals, Fischback said.

Tod Sutton, Dow’s Pittsburg site leader, said Dow will get “a stable, onsite, low-cost raw material supply by working with K2,” and that “sharing capital costs is consistent with Dow’s asset-light strategy and provides Dow better raw material integration at the Pittsburg site.”

While chlorine and bleach may be the same thing, chlorine is a deadly gas, mostly made in the Gulf, and shipped by rail.

K2’s technology “eliminates the public safety risk,” said David Cynamon, K2 executive chairman.

Cynamon and partner Brodie founded KIK Custom Products in 1997, a Concord, Ontario, company that grew to $1.5 billion in sales and is North America’s largest contract manufacturer of private label household bleach, personal care and household cleaning products. The duo sold KIK with its 25 plants in May 2007 to CI Capital Partners LLC of New York.

“We knew chlorine,” Cynamon said, “We were the largest store brand bleach manufacturer in North America.” Along with Centre Partners, their original partners at KIK, Cynamon and Brodie founded K2 and put to use their knowledge of bleach-making.

K2 is based in Toronto, Ontario, with U.S. headquarters in Uniontown, Ohio. It has 15 employees and, besides Pittsburg, plans to open bleach plants in Vernon in Southern California and later Chicago.

K2 makes bleach using only salt, water and electricity as the inputs.

K2’s plan is to reduce the need to transport chlorine for water treatment by setting up a network of regional plants using its safer method of bleach production.

While early-stage technologies are often expensive — windfarms and solar power, for example — K2 is able “to create products at no extra cost to taxpayers,” Cynamon said.

Shipping chlorine by rail isn’t allowed in Europe and Asia, he said, something that may happen in the United States.