Bitrez Ltd, the UK’s leading manufacturer of specialist polymers and chemicals, attended the Queen’s Award reception at Buckingham Palace this week (11th June) to celebrate winning a Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the Innovation category.
Bitrez’s joint Managing Directors – Paul Jones and Brian Allen – attended the reception, which was hosted by His Royal Highness Charles, Prince of Wales and included representatives from 200 other winning businesses.
The Queen’s Award is the highest accolade in the UK for business success and was awarded to Bitrez for their development of Bisphenol A (BPA) free resins, Curaphen.
Curaphen grades developed in 2013 are cross-linking agents applied internally to food and drink packaging following a worldwide health scare and mass media coverage regarding the potential harm BPA had on humans, especially expectant mothers and babies.
Not only do these Curaphen grades satisfy new regulations but they also meet the desirable processing and performance requirements of conventional BPA derivatives.
Bitrez’s exports have increased by 45 per cent in the past five years with a third of that coming from Curaphen. The company has also doubled its capacity and now runs a 24/7 operation to ensure it can meet increased volume requirements from the USA and China. To date Bitrez has sold over 800 tons of Curaphen which equates to millions of food and drink packaging been safely coated with BPA free resin every week.
Paul Jones, Managing Director, said: “It was an honour to have attended the event and to have met members of the Royal household. It is particularly rewarding for the Company to have been recognised in the innovation category.”
Bitrez has won a plethora of awards this year, including the Chemicals Northwest Awards for Manufacturer of the Year 2019. The company has also expanded its presence in USA and Mexico through the appointment of world-class Georgia-Pacific Chemicals as exclusive distributor for Curaphen grades across the United States, Canada and Mexico and the appointment of a Technical Specialist located in North America.
Based on the Bradley Hall industrial estate in Standish, Bitrez manufactures a wide range of high-performance synthetic resins and matrix systems used by world-class companies across the globe. Market sectors include specialist protective coatings, aerospace, defence, automotive and construction.
The company, which was established in 1982, also offers toll conversion services as well as technical support. Its team of highly qualified and experienced chemists can produce materials from laboratory scale through a transient pilot stage to enable scale up and allow for small scale qualification work before moving to commercial manufacture.
Bitrez’s manufacturing plant, which is COMAH [Seveso] and ISO 9001/14001/18001 compliant, comprises numerous reaction units from 3000 – 30,000 litre capacity, along with exceptional cooling facilities to accommodate high reactivity resins.
