Dow Chemical closing former Rohm & Haas plant

Dow Chemical Co. will close the former Rohm & Haas chemical plant in Philadelphia's Bridesburg section, the company told its remaining 45 workers at the 63-acre complex yesterday.

About 25 employees at the Jetted Copolymer Facility, which makes ion-exchange materials for water-filtration systems that the company builds elsewhere, will lose their jobs when production ceases "by the middle of 2010," company spokesman Bob Plishka confirmed yesterday.

The 20 other workers, employed at an herbicide unit that Dow's AgroSciences division bought from Rohm & Haas two years ago, will be gone by the end of the month, Plishka said. The decision to close the herbicide unit was announced in December 2007.

"Fixed costs at the site are too high" to keep the copolymer unit going after the herbicide unit closes, he said.

Rohm & Haas has not decided whether to sell the site, which once employed hundreds, Plishka said. "After production ends, our environmental decommissioning process will begin."

Rohm & Haas has operated at the Bridesburg site since at least the 1920s. The company employs about 2,500 at its Center City headquarters and other plants in the Philadelphia area.

Dow bought Rohm & Haas in April for $15.7 billion after trying to rescind a sales agreement that looked increasingly expensive as the economy slowed and stock prices fell.

Lawyers for major investors - including the Haas family, Philadelphia philanthropists who inherited shares from the company's cofounder - forced Dow to go through with the deal, even though Dow warned that it would have to cut expenses more than it had originally intended.

Since the purchase went through, Dow has been shopping its businesses, factories, and refineries to raise cash. And the landmark Rohm & Haas Co. headquarters building on Independence Mall is still on the market.

The decision to close the operations in Bridesburg follows DuPont Co.'s closure of another city industrial landmark, Marshall Laboratory, formerly the company's Philadelphia works, earlier this summer. The company transferred workers from the specialty-paint plant, which opened in the 1860s, to locations in the Wilmington area.