Braskem Brand Guidelines: São Paulo Resins, Green Polyethylene & a Twisted Blue-Yellow B

Copene, OPP, Trikem and three more, joined in 2002.

Braskem was created in August 2002 by integrating six companies of the Odebrecht organisation and the Mariani group, the company says on its Brazilian website. English Wikipedia names the six as Copene, OPP, Trikem, Nitrocarbono, Proppet and Polialden. Portuguese Wikipedia says the new company listed its shares on the São Paulo exchange and in New York that year, and on the Latibex market in Madrid in 2003. Its headquarters are in São Paulo.

The roots go back further. Portuguese Wikipedia says Odebrecht, then a construction group and today called Novonor, entered petrochemicals in 1979 by buying a third of Companhia Petroquímica de Camaçari, a PVC producer. It formed Odebrecht Química in 1987, took part in the privatisation of the sector in the early 1990s, created OPP Petroquímica in 1995 and Trikem in 1996, and joined the Mariani group to set up Proppet. In 2001 the two groups took control of Copene, the raw-materials centre of the Camaçari complex in Bahia, and of Polialden.

Growth then came by acquisition. English Wikipedia lists Politeno in 2006. In 2007 Braskem joined Petrobras and Ultrapar in buying Grupo Ipiranga: the other two shared the fuel business, while Braskem took over the petrochemical arm, Ipiranga Petroquímica. Quattor followed, announced in January 2010 and approved by CADE, Brazil’s competition authority, in February 2011. Abroad, Braskem bought the polypropylene assets of Sunoco Chemicals in the United States in 2010 and, in 2011, the polypropylene business of Dow, with two plants in Texas and two in Germany, at Wesseling and Schkopau. Portuguese Wikipedia adds the Braskem Idesa joint venture in Mexico, formed in 2012 to build and run a petrochemical complex.

Resins from naphtha, gas and sugarcane.

Braskem describes itself as the only integrated first- and second-generation thermoplastic resin producer in Brazil. Its first-generation plants make basic petrochemicals such as ethylene and propylene from naphtha, natural gas and ethane; its second-generation plants turn them into polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP) and PVC, which converters then shape into finished goods. It also sells chemicals including butadiene, benzene, toluene and solvents. The company says it has plants in Brazil, the United States, Germany and Mexico, and calls itself the largest producer of thermoplastic resins in the Americas.

English Wikipedia places its main Brazilian complexes at Camaçari in Bahia, Mauá in São Paulo state and Triunfo in Rio Grande do Sul, with a gas-based complex at Duque de Caxias in Rio de Janeiro state. Braskem America is based in Philadelphia, with a technology and innovation centre in Pittsburgh, and Braskem Europe in Rotterdam, with plants at Schkopau and Wesseling.

The product that shaped its public image is polyethylene made from sugarcane. English Wikipedia says a plant at Triunfo making ethylene from sugarcane ethanol was inaugurated in September 2010, with a capacity of 200,000 tonnes a year. The company sells this material as its I’m green bio-based line, and its sustainability pages add a bio-based EVA resin from sugarcane for footwear and automotive uses, a demonstration plant in Copenhagen for bio-based MEG, one of the main ingredients of PET, and a joint venture with Sojitz to make that MEG at industrial scale. Braskem says its renewable plastics hold ISCC PLUS and Bonsucro certifications.

The way it talks about itself follows the same lines. Its profile page opens with the circular economy and carbon neutrality, and lists the everyday fields its chemistry and plastics serve: health, transport, food, household goods and personal care.

How petrochemical makers present themselves.

Petrochemical makers sell materials most people never see on their own: ethylene and propylene, and the pellets of polyethylene, polypropylene and PVC that other companies turn into film, bottles, pipes and car parts. With no product on a shop shelf, the company name has to do most of the work, and many of these firms present it as a bold corporate wordmark, often in capitals or a heavy sans, set on plain white pages.

Colour tends to be cool and sober. Blues and greens recur across the trade’s websites and reports, and pictures lean on the plants themselves: crackers, columns and pipe racks photographed at dusk, lit against a dark sky, or tanker ships and rail terminals at the edge of a port. The plant is the product, so the plant becomes the image.

The websites follow a shared structure. Product pages are usually organised by polymer family — polyethylene, polypropylene, PVC and the rest — with grades, process technologies and trademarked range names, and with applications grouped by market: packaging, cars and construction are the usual first three. Many makers now give equal space to circularity and recycling, with pages for recycled or renewable-based ranges and chemical recycling projects, and publish annual safety, sustainability and community reports as part of the same identity.

The makers in this guide share that vocabulary but come from different histories: mergers of older companies, buyouts of single plants, joint ventures between oil groups and family conglomerates. This guide sets out who founded each one, who owns it and how its name came about, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A twisted B in blue and yellow.

Braskem’s own site explains its mark. The colours of the logo stand for its values, it says: blue links the company to sustainability and yellow represents the energy of people. Together they evoke strength, which the twist of the B also expresses, and the mark carries a sense of movement meant to suggest a positive look ahead. The company keeps its strategy, identity and brand assets on a platform open only to staff and suppliers, so that the brand appears the same way everywhere.

Its recent history has been difficult. In 2016, Portuguese Wikipedia says, Braskem signed a leniency agreement with authorities in Brazil, the United States and Switzerland over matters investigated in the Lava Jato inquiry. In Maceió, the capital of Alagoas, ground subsidence in several neighbourhoods came to public notice after a tremor in the Pinheiro district on 3 March 2018; Portuguese Wikipedia says studies linked it to the company’s rock-salt extraction, and that Braskem announced the end of that extraction in 2019 and began sealing its 35 wells. In November 2023 the city declared an emergency over the risk of a mine collapsing, and in November 2025 Braskem announced an agreement with the state of Alagoas on compensation, which ends the state’s lawsuit and needed court approval, Agência Brasil reported.

Ownership changed in 2026. Novonor signed a contract on 20 April 2026 handing the investment firm IG4 Capital 50.11% of Braskem’s voting capital, ADVFN reported, and O Globo wrote in November 2026 that the IG4-linked fund had become a shareholder in the second quarter and now shares management with Petrobras, which holds 47.03% of the voting shares. Braskem filed for an out-of-court restructuring, a recuperação extrajudicial, on 24 August 2026, Estado de Minas reported via Folhapress, and its Mexican unit Braskem Idesa was in Chapter 11 proceedings in the United States, Valor International reported in October 2026. Talks with creditors had been extended to 11 November 2026, O Globo reported; the restructuring was not completed at the time of writing.

For a design guide, Braskem shows how a chemicals maker can explain its own colours in plain words and build a public story around one material made from sugarcane. Compare Ipiranga, the Brazilian fuel brand whose former petrochemical arm Braskem took over in 2007, and Dow, whose polypropylene business it bought in 2011. For this guide we use a deep blue, a warm yellow and a cane green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Braskem’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.