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Sustainability / Natural Solutions
An Interview with Stephen Wilson, Business Director, Performance Chemicals at Thomas Swan
Thomas Swan & Co. Ltd has built an innovative and independent approach to manufacturing chemicals by working closely with leading universities to develop cutting-edge technologies. Their manufacturing segment is divided into The Performance Chemicals Division and The Advanced Chemicals Division.
The Performance Chemicals Division manufactures a broad range of essential additives & active pharmaceutical ingredients. These products enhance the processes and performance used to manufacture:
- Tires, synthetic rubber, leather,
- Powder coatings, flexographic inks, and
- Household & personal care products.
They have specially developed viscosity-reduction additives, bonding agents, and polar modifiers for the rubber processing and polymer industries. This product range provides time, energy, cost, and environmental benefits. Over the coming years, they are also committed to reducing the carbon footprint of products and achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2030.
We recently interviewed Stephen Wilson, Business Director, Performance Chemicals at Thomas Swan to discover the innovations taking place under this segment and how their company has become a one-stop solution for customers looking for a more sustainable approach. Let’s hear from him!
#1 – Can you tell us about the history of Thomas Swan Performance Chemicals and how it began producing Specialty chemicals?
Thomas Swan & Co. Ltd. was founded in 1926 by ‘Tommy’ Swan who saw an opportunity to take the waste product of the local Consett Steelworks and use it as a free raw material to make road surfaces. Our move into chemicals came from the need to develop surfactants that helped bitumen stick to wet road stones as the road paving business grew.
We are very proud of our history which forms a key part of our culture. For a business to survive into its fourth generation of family ownership, it must achieve a balance of stability and reliability against the need to innovate and consistently rejuvenate itself to ensure we remain relevant and continue to deliver value to our customers. Today, Thomas Swan is very different from the company set up in 1926, in scale, complexity, and technology, but there are strong echoes of our founding principles around recycling a waste stream, that would otherwise have caused environmental issues, into a valuable product that still resonates.
This early “sustainable” approach to business is now deeply engrained in our business philosophy and strategy. Doing business in a financially, socially, and environmentally sustainable way is core to our beliefs and will hopefully ensure the business makes it into a fifth generation! Sustainability in conjunction with innovation presents an opportunity to grow with the aim of delivering a healthy business for the future and a range of products using renewable raw materials, with sustainable benefits that contribute to the well-being of society.
We are proud of our history, from having products used to protect the Statue of Liberty as part of its restoration in 1985, to developing scalable graphene production technology, we enjoy what we do and are always looking to innovate. As we approach our centenary our long-held values and purpose give us clear guidance for the next 100 years!
#2 – Thomas Swan is the only European producer of the primary active ingredient used in chemical peptizers. What materials are offered in this range?
The key business unit within Thomas Swan Performance Chemicals is our Performance Polymer division. This business unit is focused on delivering performance benefits to the wider polymer market and in particular, we have a long history of working with the tire and rubber market.
Our
PEPTON® range is the originally trademarked chemical peptizer. This material is used in the production of automotive tires to reduce the mechanical energy and temperature required to process the rubber. Even fractional energy savings in polymer processing reduces the carbon footprint and cost of manufacture. It is this extrinsic sustainability impact we are looking to maximize with the wider range of formulated peptizers that make up the full PEPTON® range.
Our aim is to deliver easy-to-use, accurately dosed, optimized formulated blends. The range allows us to offer a full spectrum of active content products that enable simple dosing and dispersion, irrespective of individual customer product recipes. Our formulated materials deliver specific market needs such as low ash content and specific melt points. They also meet dosing and material handling requirements right through to low-melt bags of pre-weighed formula for specific production batches. We take away the complexity and improve the consistency to ensure repeatable, deliverable results.
We are the only European producer of the base component that is the building block of this technology and set the benchmark on quality. Small incremental efficiencies combine to realize huge full process benefits, starting from the highest quality and maintaining the tightest consistency matters.
#3 – How is Thomas Swan fulfilling their sustainability goals with the PEPTON® grades?
We benchmark our products either based on their intrinsic or extrinsic sustainability credentials.
- Intrinsic sustainability is often the easiest to see and understand. This would be the biobased renewable content, the biodegradability or lifecycle of the product, and the energy and production techniques we use.
- Extrinsic product sustainability is less tangible but is where the use of a product allows an operation to be more sustainable than normal and/or contributes to defined sustainable development goals.
For the PEPTON® range, we look to contribute in both ways. By sustainable purchasing, we can increase the biobased content of the range. We already produce our
PEPTON® using 100% green electricity thanks to our on-site anaerobic digestion plant, meaning that Thomas Swan PEPTON® materials have a very low production carbon footprint.
The larger impact we are focusing on is maximizing the performance of the material in use, and fractional energy savings in the tire production process compound to make meaningful differences to the carbon footprint of the much more carbon-intensive step. We are developing an Eco PEPTON® range that will deliver demonstrable improvements in both intrinsic and extrinsic performance.
#4 – Having achieved EcoVadis Platinum standard in both 2021 and 2022, Thomas Swan was awarded Gold standard in 2023, what was the reason for this, and will you be working towards platinum for 2024?
We have tightly tied the future of our business to operating sustainably and the value we believe that brings us, our industry, and all consumers. The ultimate judge of how successful we are is ourselves against our own targets. It is fair to say that my interpretation of Thomas Swan’s sustainability journey, activities, and implementation of sustainability improvements have been driven by internal prioritization.
Our participation in EcoVadis was partly due to other companies in our supply chain requesting that we consider it and partly due to the desire to externally verify our progress on our sustainability journey. We were delighted with the platinum award for two years in a row, as it demonstrated to our customers and our employees that we were really making progress with our sustainable objectives.
We feel achieving gold in this year’s assessment is still a huge accolade for a company our size and our score put us in the top 2% of all companies. We don’t believe we have gone backward, as one of the strengths of the EcoVadis system is that the award bands keep getting tighter and the bar keeps raising, the aim isn’t that everybody gets the top rating. Where our strategy and EcoVadis align well, is that there is no finish line to sustainability, the standard we set ourselves is continually refined as we look to deliver against our targets. Positive progress is what is important to us. In the near term, these targets include:
- Net zero carbon footprint by 2030
- Life cycle analysis of our top 80% of products and all new products
- Year on year increased biobased content of products produced
- Product development based on UN sustainable development goals
#5 – Is Thomas Swan planning to launch more performance materials in the coming months/years that are more sustainable?
One of the ways we have looked to rise to Harry Swan’s (CEO and Owner) strategic challenge of evolving our business to a fully sustainable portfolio, is through the resourcing of Green Feather Innovations (GFI). GFI is our in-house dedicated product development group tasked with risk managing our way into new technologies and ensuring our development programs meet our sustainability objectives and benchmarks.
Not only are we working on synthesizing and developing biobased or sustainably derived alternates for petrochemical-based materials, but we are also looking to develop alternates for many of our own legacy products. We have a healthy pipeline of product development to deliver to our core markets with the objective of offering alternatives to some of our biggest existing products.
COMPLETE PRODUCT RANGE BY THOMAS SWAN
About Stephen Wilson
Stephen joined Thomas Swan as Business Director, Performance Chemical Division in May 2021. Prior to this, he worked at Croda where he held the position of Global Business Director for their Polymer Effects business. He has a considerable experience in sales, marketing, strategy, new product development, and a shared passion for sustainability.