Research & Development

Understanding emerging needs

Our R&D departments constantly address issues of overarching importance to the chemical industry and try to devise timely solutions to them.  We are committed to solving everyday problems as they arise, but we look into the future as well.  One of the key mandates of our research and development scientists is to understand emerging needs and develop new products and services to satisfy those needs in the future.

Overall, about 70 percent of our R&D efforts focus on optimizing and improving existing products for our key markets. The remaining 30 percent is spent on devising new products. In everything we do, we work very closely with our customers. We rely on best-in-class support departments, including our world-class process engineering. We centrally coordinate our R&D department so that proper interaction and knowledge exchange takes place among large corps of our scientists and engineers.

R&D at LANXESS is truly global. Our European laboratories are historically the oldest and best-established, but as our geographical footprint has expanded, so has our R&D operation. The newest additions are labs in Brazil and China, and we want to ensure that our R&D efforts will increasingly take advantage of the valuable human resources – and specialized, market-specific knowledge – that are available around the world.

Today, in keeping with our overall mission, a big priority is the field of “green chemistry.”  LANXESS and its scientists have already made key contributions to improving availability of clean water through innovative chemical processes and increasing fuel efficiency in automobiles, thereby reducing carbon emissions.