PolyAd investing more than $8 million in US headquarters

Plastics additives maker PolyAd Services LLC will spend $8.4 million on a headquarters and related work in the St. Louis area.

General contractor McGrath & Associates has begun design and preliminary work to convert 85,000 square feet of warehouse space at PolyAd's Earth City, Mo., location, according to a news release from St. Louis-based McGrath.

The converted site will include production space, research labs, headquarters and a conference center for the BYK North America Plastics team of Altana AG, as well as PolyAd. Altana, a specialty chemicals firm based in Wesel, Germany, already owned German specialty chemicals maker BYK before acquiring PolyAd last year.

Construction for the new project is scheduled for completion in July. The new space will accommodate R&D labs and offices, production, a shared plastics lab, a 42-seat seminar room and smaller conference rooms for break-out sessions. These features will support on-site customer seminars and collaboration projects for the new BYK Plastic Additives Competence Center, officials said.

McGrath built the original building in 2015 as a manufacturing site for PolyAd, which offers additive solutions for plastics in several industries including automotive, construction, packaging and electronics.

Altana has 47 production facilities and more than 50 service and research labs worldwide. BYK supplies additives and measuring instruments and has production sites in Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States and China.

PolyAd was part of global plastics and chemicals giant BASF SE before being sold in 2014 to Cleveland private equity firm Edgewater Capital Partners LP. Under Edgewater, PolyAd added two manufacturing lines in Earth City, increased sales of specialized, customer-specific formulations to the plastics industry and introduced two new products.

In addition to Earth City, PolyAd has a production plant in Lampertheim, Germany. The business was founded in 1982 as a unit of Mallinckrodt Chemicals. It then became part of Ciba before going to BASF.

BYK will be NPE2018, Booth S34178.