Specialty chemicals group Altana AG (Wesel, Germany; www.altana.com) has announced that its wholly owned subsidiary ACTEGA Rhenania GmbH, a globally leading coatings and adhesives specialist, is erecting a new laboratory building in Grevenbroich, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. The company is investing around €10 million in the new building.
Encompassing a space of 5,700 square meters, the new laboratory building of ACTEGA Rhenania will be twice as large as the site’s two current labs combined. Research and development, quality control and service will be united here under one roof. “So far, these laboratories have been housed in separate buildings,” says Dr. Thomas Sawitowski, the managing director of ACTEGA Rhenania. “By bringing together these departments in one building we are optimizing our processes and thus can support our customers even more efficiently with new developments.”
The laboratory building was planned by architects and engineers of Vollack GmbH & Co. KG, which specializes in the conceptual design, planning, and completion of office and industrial buildings. One requirement the planners have to meet is to integrate a customer technology center into the new building. It will contain various production facilities in miniature format, enabling ACTEGA to understand the production processes and specific requirements of customers better than purely under laboratory conditions.
So far, the different facilities have been spread around the site. With the planned customer technology center, the company will be able to test new trends for packaging, such as coffee capsules and aluminum trays, at a central location. “One of our most important competitive advantages is that we develop innovative packaging solutions in close cooperation with our customers,” says Dr. Sawitowski. “With the new representative customer technology center we will now meet this demand spatially as well.” Not only ACTEGA Rhenania but also other companies in the ACTEGA division will make use of it in the future.
The move into the new building is slated for mid-2017.