Chemicals

Albania's chemical industry was geared mainly toward producing agrochemicals and chemicals for minerals processing. During the effort to achieve economic self-reliance in the 1970s and 1980s, Albania's government frantically tried to increase fertilizer output at plants in Krujė and Fier, which produced nitrogen and phosphate from imported rock phosphate. Nitrogen and phosphate fertilizer production totaled about 350 billion tons between 1985 and 1990. A lack of spare parts and raw materials, especially natural gas, halted production in mid-1991. Western economists estimated that the US$3 million needed for the main phosphate plants' rehabilitation might be too high a price to pay because domestic deposits of key raw materials were projected to last only three to five years at normal production rates. One of Albania's two ammonia-urea plants planned to restart operations in 1992, but it desperately needed spare parts and environmental protection equipment. The country's lone pesticide plant, which did not stop producing DDT until 1982, made lindane as well as products based on sulfur, zinc, copper, and mercury. In 1991 the facility was working at less than 10 percent of capacity, and production was not likely to be stepped up because the plant was in poor condition and environmentally unsafe. Other chemical enterprises included a plastics-fabrication facility at Lushnjė, a rubber and plastics works at Durrės, and a paint and pigment factory in Tiranė.

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Source: U.S. Library of Congress