Suppliers Team on Colored Grades of High-Performance Polymer

Avient and BASF are collaborating to offer colored grades of Ultrason high-performance polymers to the global market. The colored grades feature BASF’s Ultrason polyarylethersulfones (PAES) as high-quality base polymer combined with Avient’s Colorant Chromatics high-temperature color formulation expertise for color concentrates and pre-colored solutions.

The collaboration will offer customers in industries such as household and catering, electrical & electronics (E&E), and healthcare a distinctive benefit by providing comprehensive technical support from the base polymer to the final-colored product. As a result, customers will be able to react more quickly to design trends, meet technical requirements as well as color standards, and thereby increase speed to market.

The full-color Ultrason portfolio can also help contribute to a more sustainable lifestyle by enabling reusable, high-quality, and stylish household and catering articles. Products can be reused by consumers and recirculated by caterers many times while maintaining performance and design. Thus, they support a circular economy, avoiding single-use plastics and reducing packaging waste caused by conventional catering, take-away, and to-go articles.

“The market requirements for colored, high-performance polymers are clear: you have to react quickly and also be able to supply various volumes of colored material,” says Anne Hippert, general manager, Colorant Chromatics at Avient. “With this collaboration, we can offer the best of both worlds in high-performance polymers. Avient is well-known for its specialized color solutions, respecting the customers’ final application requirements, and BASF is well-known for its excellent Ultrason quality and broad material competency. Together, we are committed to bringing innovative PAES to the market, meeting color challenges across multiple industries, including the household and food industry, where we see the use of Ultrason® as a perfect fit for our customers’ sustainability efforts by promoting appealing colors for reusable and safe applications.”

“Avient’s Colorant Chromatics business is known for being a strong and agile color solution provider for specialty polymers while BASF is a well-recognized producer of high-quality Ultrason,” adds Florian Hennenberger, global business development Ultrason at BASF. “By working together, we can now offer customized colors with Ultrason as a base material to existing and new customers. By combining the global networks of both companies with the color formulation expertise of Avient and the broad material competency and portfolio of BASF, this collaboration will lead to smoother and less complex product development for our customers.”

Avient and BASF have a long history of collaboration in the field of PAES. Through this next stage of cooperation, the companies can more readily meet the demand for various-sized orders with short lead times, with the capability to serve different industries. The colored grades will be formulated and sold by Avient as Colorant Chromatics made with Ultrason by BASF.