Engineering products developer PVAXX, which boasts an environmentally friendly pallet to enhance warehousing efficiency, is poised for an AIM float this month to pay off debt and develop production facilities.

Chaired by Douglas Hogg (not the Tory politician) and run by chief executive officer Hugh Stevens, the Bermuda-listed company has created a new material, a plastic and sand compound called siluma, which enables the pallets made from it to be recycled. PVAXX says its siluma pallets create less waste and are cheaper and more reusable than wooden pallets, as well as being more resistant to contaminants and insect attack.

The company says it first needs to complete a ‘refinancing through a private placement of at least $75 million [£38 million]’. The proceeds would repay a credit facility with Merrill Lynch and then go towards the building of a production facility in Oman and its pallet production lines. PVAXX, whose board includes City figure Alastair Gunn-Forbes, admits that it ‘has yet to produce significant volumes of PVAXX pallets with its current technology’ but is now marketing an institutional placing to accelerate this.

The company signed a territorial manufacturing and distribution agreement last July in the US for London-based RM Squared to produce 20 production lines over three years. PVAXX, which has splashed out to sponsor the Renault Formula 1 team, says the deal needs more capital.

A mid-month float is on the cards, with Dawnay, Day as nominated adviser and St Helen’s Capital as broker.