According to Dr Stefan Mößmer, Managing Director BYK Marketing & Commercial: “This decision contributes to our overarching sustainability strategy of proactively replacing harmful chemicals with more environmentally friendly and ideally renewable product technologies. We at Byk are aware of our obligation to offer a large proportion of our new developments with sustainable additives in the future. With a clear cut, which we communicate transparently and at an early stage, we not only show that we are innovation leaders, but also want to make it easy for our customers to phase out PFAS-containing products in good time by offering differentiated alternatives and showing new, sustainable and more environmentally friendly ways of formulating them.
Our broad technology platform in our Research & Development division allows us to develop more environmentally friendly additives with alternative, fluorine-free building blocks and offer them to our customers, which achieve a similar spectrum of effectiveness in many applications. Our end-use colleagues are working closely with our customers on PFAS-free, future-orientated formulations. We benefit from the fact that Byk prioritised considerable research efforts early on to replace perfluorinated and polyfluorinated alkyl-containing products with more environmentally friendly alternatives.”