Addmaster Innovation Looks Strong
1 Jan 2008
Superbugs mastered!
Innovative use of additive is winning more sales overseas
Addmaster's Managing Director cover's himself in Biomaster masterbatch |
Silver is helping Addmaster strike gold in the flight against hospital superbugs such as MRSA. The Stafford Science Park company has developed silver based antimicrobial additive which can help stop the spread of the infection dead in its tracks. Its Biomaster products can be added to paper, plastics and textiles during manufacture and, in simplest terms, their presence prevents bacteria from multiplying. That technology has also made Addmaster (UK) winner of The Sentinel's Small Business of the Year in 2001, a contender for this year's Staffordshire and Black Country Business Innovation Centre-sponsored Business Innovation Award. Plastics, papers and cloths incorporating the additive are increasingly being used for work surfaces, casebook folders, cleaning wipes and even as the fabric of nurses' uniforms. Biomaster's success now accounts for £2 million - a figure set to hit £3 million in the current year of Addmaster's turnover. And an increasing percentage of its sales is being won overseas, a trend likely to accelerate following approval by America's FDA and now its EPA. Founding managing director Paul Morris said: "We operate differently from other companies in our sector by creating bespoke products which meet client needs exactly rather than selling from a standard range. "We contract our manufacturing out, which enables us to concentrate on product research, development and testing, and supplying clients with a level of technical support they are unlikely to get anywhere else. "Silver based antimicrobial additives have been around for a while, but their use was restricted largely to Japan due to a lack of knowledge elsewhere. "We were able to develop the technology internally and to convert it into major commercial success with growing sales in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and South-East Asia too." Biomaster eliminates the problem of bacteria becoming resistant to traditional chlorinated antimicrobial additives. It acts against them on three fronts, so an organism would have to re-invent itself to develop resistance simultaneously to all three separate lines of attack - in order to survive and multiply. The odds of that happening in a single generation is "many millions to on against." |
Addmaster has more than 50 products in use by the NHS and more than 900 others in use in other industry sectors, products with uses ranging from in-building resistance to ultra-violet light sensitivity, and adding a deodorizing factor to nappy bags, to making bio-degradable meat and vegetable packaging. One can be added to plastics, papers and textiles as a security marker enabling traceability and brand protection, and another is incorporated into cement bag material so that bags dissolve when thrown into building site cement mixers.
Source - Sentinel Business Awards Feature, January 2008
Biomaster is a registered trademark of Addmaster, based in Stafford UK. Addmaster is Europe's leading supplier of performance additives for a wide range of applications and industries. By working in partnership with its customers and focussing on research and development, highly innovative additives have been created and successfully introduced into many manufacturing environments. Addmaster's advanced products are being used by many of the world's industry leaders in the plastics, paper, paint, textile and coating industries.
Addmaster, founded in the year 2000, sees its major objective as capitalising on the lack of innovation which exists in these industry sectors, and has won many business awards for innovations in product development and marketing.
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