Aug 7, 2023 15 min read

The most recognizable bridges in Pittsburgh arguably are the Roberto Clemente, the Andy Warhol, and the Rachel Carson bridges, the trio of identical suspension bridges – all yellow – that span the Allegheny River.

Called the Sister Bridges, they’re painted “Aztec gold,” a shade of yellow that WHAT.

 lot of things that make in Burgettstown, all these.

Company Lanxess used to be part of Baer corp., LANXESS was started in 2004, and then this site in 2006, in 2004 we were out in Imperial, then moved here in this industrial park was starting, we were first tenant. 

We make iron oxide pigment blends here, the iron oxide itself is made primarily in Germany, we also  have a facility in Brazil and in china, Germany makes red, yellow black and green, which is a chrome oxide. 

So there’s a huge plant in Germany, inside this plant it is the size of a city, there are different companies that own property, they just reuse each other’s materials, it’s kind of a really cool green area, Lederheusen, it was the town , Bayern the soccer team, there’s a community around it, employees lived there. It’s like its own city, and the way stream from this facility flows right into the production stream for this one and it just keeps , it’s incredible how intertwined these companies are and how they work together and there are cafeterias there and it’s during the day it’s its own little city. Lederkusen in Germany is the town. I still couldn’t tell you how to get around inside.

LANXESS has several facilities in Leverkusen. We have 10 different business units that operate as part of our company, as everything from inorganic pigments that are made here to we have flavors and fragrances, liquid purification technology, from things that go into car parts to things that go color concrete pavers. We have 10 different business units that work in three different segments, three different business segments. 

Inorganic pigments are part of our advanced intermediate segment….so not only does this happen in Leverkusen, but we have several other, Saltego has a big facility, it’s bug spray, a product you’re provably familiar with DEET, this is the alternative to DEET that goes into a lot of bug sprays you’ll buy in bug sprays at places like CVS and other places, so we make a bug product. It’s a very intertwined city of chemical companies kind of I’d say big portion , sustainability, I think europeans really started that, that drive comes from there, utilizing each others waste streams,  recirculating things into production is a big part of our philosophy .

It’s on the Rhine River we use a lot of water to make rust. (iron oxide). The water we pull out of the Rhine the stuff that we process we actually process cleaning the water at the site, the water we put back in the river is cleaner than the water we took out.That’s one of the nice things. 

We make yellows in Brazil, reds strictly in China, and then we ship them all here and we make browns in oranges. Blending. We make different shades of yellows, reds, blacks and greens, we take everything there and we blend it into whatever color our customers need. so it’s like my kids dream when I was younger, you get to play with mud, yeah, I’ll go with that. our product is used in everything from anything that has cement in it, that has color in it has iron oxide pigment in it. also we color asphalt, we color blocks, bricks, pavers, any Target building in the area has our pigment in it, the block on the outside of this building has our pigment in it. Our customers can buy the components, the reds yellows and blacks and make their own browns, or some people can’t do that, smaller companies, so we make the color for them. 

The companies we would deal with wouldn’t be end user you find at the store. If you go to Home Depot you’ll see paved stone, Sherwin-Williams uses a lot of our pigments. 

It’s used as a catalyst for airbags in cars, for the explosion, causes the explosion to expand the airbags. Makeup, there’s a lot of iron oxide in makeup. In wrappers in Reese’s peanut butter cups, that’s iron oxide pigment. and pet food, dog and cat food. It looks brown because of iron oxide pigment. It’s edible iron oxide , food grade. It’s used in places you’d never even think of. 

The things you’d take for granted, like pavers and bricks and block, the color, what you see, you think it comes out looking like that. 

The tile flooring here has iron oxide in it, any kind of vinyl flooring has Iron oxide in it. We are synthetic iron oxide, natural iron oxide has silicone and you don’t want to use, we leave all silicone out and are 99% pure iron oxide, it’s not organic pigments, you don’t want to sue a natural. 

MIKE- its ability to weather different conditions is why we use synthetic iron oxide, it has a staying power…

We have one shift, Monday through Friday, 7 am. to 3:30, business is down a little, 6 people production, 3 in warehouse, four in labs, and us management. all on site, management we work, supervisor of production is running machines or bagging material. At one point we had 2 shifts running back here. 

A lot of our products being made…there was a bunch of material sitting on the ocean, inventory is sitting in places waiting to get sold. During covid nobody was traveling people were painting, DEKING MATERIAL. people spending on houses, we couldn’t keep up, now people traveling, it’s all cyclical.

Been here 26 years, I started off had 2 year associate degree, worked in lab for construction industry, over the years went through bachelors and masters over years, became a technical service rep, would help customers on site, to being a lab coordinator to being the plant manager, so I worked my way up from someone standing on a bench doing things to somebody actually running the place and making the decisions.  

I think LANXSS is invested in their employees, if you want to be something they will help you achieve it, I’m a perfect example of that I went from an hourly employee sit-inng on a bench making custom colors for  people to running the building and a lot of that is because I said I wanted to , and they help you, provide classes you need.

MIKE – they’re invested in you, you are we have a You matter program but you really do matter. We are offered trainings, I could learn a different side of the business and they’d help me. There’s all of the great things employers have in terms of compensation but there’s so much more. 

The variety of things we do make it a stable place to do.

We have 85 nationalities represented across our employee base, we’re all learning from each other from what we do day-to-day but culturally also, we’re learning about different ways the world works. 

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, we follow those , everything from poverty, global issues, we find how we can address those in our company. Fascinating that even in times of economic challenge we’re in as a company, we’re not cutting back on our goal to  meet UNS goals. It says a lot about he company and the people leading the omcpany. 

Before things were required, LANXESS recognezed same sex marriage, maternity and paternity leave. recognize if you’re adopting you get maternity or paternity leave. They really care about their people. 

Three of four people in this office have been here longer than me. The tenure people have. My boss from 2004 is still here. People don’t leave and that kind of says all you need to know, they take care of their people. 

It’s been really great company….John’s been a proponent. We have a partnership with Nazareth Prep, a private school, we mentor, the kids are inner city kids, they’re trying to provide them a better opportunity, we have five high school students who for 2 years have come to different failcityes, neville island, here and Pgh, they come here as interns, Mentor what their next steps are 

We’re a safe site, we’ve never had a recordable accident or lost work day, we’re big on safety. I’m here with Bees. Education is why we do it…Another we’re doing in Canada, we are donating bee hotels to a local nature reserve, we have pigments, specific shade of red made in Germany that bees attract to, they put these bee hotels in forested areas to attract them for hives. 

We do paints, vinyl flooring, astroturf, pavers, ready mix concrete, really anything that has color in it has pigment in it. 

part of what we do in this building is We have labs, fthis is for technical services for customers, this is for paints, coatings and specialties, where we would do colored mulch, with the red mulch outside, we do colored mulch, plastic wood, any kinds of paints, coatings, rubber, anything we can’t do we ship off to Germany

Those are all the colors up here, we make different shades of red, blue shade of red is almost mauve, yellow shade reds, 180 different colors…..TIO2 is a white pigment, you’ve probably used it if you brushed your teeth or wrote on a piece of paper. 

We do technical service for the construction industry and we do quality control work  for production. when they make a pigment they start with a certain formulation, we look at a color, they bring it in they compare it to a standard pigment to make sure the color is within specifications and so besides the …..we it looks like a Breaking Bad scene, weights…

we have customers sending in pavers and they’ll say, make the color in these pavers, so what we tell them give us all of your aggregates and cements and we will mix designs and we will make small copies of your product and you’ll compare that to the product you want to call,

and to show that w’ere honest. We create what they sent us and what we suggest, what our suggestion is, so there’s two slightly different colors…..doesn’t look any different to me.

This is customers current production line, this is what we suggest they run. We do that all the time. 

So when we talk about we make our oranges and browns, these are the products, each ones are different levels of reds, yellow and blacks. These are for customers making mortar, its’ easier to throw in a bag of pigment and a bag of cement and a bag of sand, when they’re doing stucco it’s easy to throw out a one pound bag of pigment for a one pound bag of stucco than it is for someone to actually weight it out or make a color for themselves. 

this is sand, crushed stone,

This is actually red yellow and black and these are at 10% increments, this is 90% red and 10 yellow, this just shows our customers the amount of colors they can make, change the pigments….

Mortar and pestles, for mixing cement pigment and polyvinyl acetate so you can put it onto a piece of paper and evaluate the color. 

Shakers – what we do is when they get a sample in from QC lab, we actually weigh out 100 grams of the little BBs, 10 grams of cement, and 1.5% moving pigment based on amount of cement, shake it for 5 minutes, disperse s the pigment in the cement, then mix with the polyvinyl acetate and that makes our cement draw downs. You know what this is based off of, we can make permanent record.

This is art class….this is you can learn about color, you can learn how to do color, takes a while but we can look at stuff and say here is what this color is going to be and it usually is that way. that’s how good you can get. 

Pigment , anything you bump into has pigment on it, walls, it did not look this big, our yellow bags, black bags, there’s all different colors in there, it’s color coded, blacks in black bags, yellow in yellow bags, 

you can see it on the walls, this is filled with red pigment. we know it has red, R01, it’s a broader spectrum red, basically we ……

We ran into….you got some pigment on you…every day. Different colored shoes. That was yesterday’s colors, this is today’s colors. I was doing yellow before that.

Barry is dance instructor, I do tap, jazz ballet, musical theater…if you can count to 8, you got rhythm, they’re dancing to a different beat.

when we get to the warehouse I’ll show you how we stage things. We’re not running anything back here, when we are in operation, what happens we have a customer that orders a certain pigment and how much they want, it comes down to us, the lab does the formulation and says this is how many pounds of each color you need, so they take they weigh it up here, this is one of our large mixers, they will put it in, weigh it out, pour it in, blends for 20 to 40 minutes, they send a sample back to the lab, lab evaluates it, if it looks good, they bag it off, the baggers, these will weigh down to 8 pounds of pigment, this is a 55 pound bag, it can weigh down to 8 pounds. once we bag it up, we ship it off. 4 mixers, 2 large, small, , can do 12,000 pounds, 6,000-8,000 pounds, 2,000  pounds. 

Then, bags are 8 to 55 pounds. 

That is super cool, Weirton, danced with Michael Jackson.

This is where we weigh, they weigh one pound of pigment, it’s two men, 5,000  1 pound bags, will take 2 days, try to do 2,500 a day, we already did 1,200 today, before lunch. We take a bag like this, we have stickers, that material is material we’re going to use to put in bag, gonna take sticker, putt on bag somewhere….We fold it back, staple it, I t leaves here and goes to Walmart, Home Depot, for people who want to do their own little thing. We put it in a box, we have mend’s stuff, I don’t know. WE don’t get a lot of hand packing, usually using machine, 15,000 to 16,000 pounds at a time…what comes out of the lab comes out on sheet of paper, we look at it, it has numbers on it, and then I have to take it and I have to put it together like making a cake, 180 different colors, it’s very satisfying to watch how clean it can get, broom. We clean, believe that….this is clean.

Take a walk through the warehouse….it gets hot in the summer, come July won’t feel so good in here…fans blow stuff everywhere. 

Staging the boxes they put the 1 pound boxes in. look at bottom of boots. get a better view from the other side. 

So, the world clocks, that is cool. this is the main hQ in Germany, this is another binding facility in the UK in Branson, this is our red plant, this is our yellow plant, and Sydney is another blending facility. 

So we have trucks that arrive at the docks, if they’re green pigment, we unload it, put it onto our shelves, the pigment is either going to be sen directly to customers or It could be used to make the blends in the back, this is waiting for trucks to arrive to be shipped off to customers, this is a staging area for the pigments. We can operate, at one point we had 1.2 million pounds of pigment in here, that’s the capacity, 

Culture matters, when you’re in a small plant….Stuff you don’t think about.

Washington County coloring the world, chemistry like this is always the unsung hero. You build a retaining wall, you don’t think about the color, you want the wall to look nice and even, but color is a huge part of that, and whatever product it is that we make, it’s kind of the unsung hero, the glue that keeps it together. 

BASF’s old commercial, they’re our competition. They said, we don’t make a lot of the products you buy, we make a lot of the products you buy better. so it’s kind of that’s how chemistry companies operate, we’re always tinkering to make something more efficient, more economically viable, more safe more sustainable. the same product you keep buying, this hard hat these safety glasses, somebody’s tinkering with the chemistry of that product to make it better, whether that be colors or candles that we are putting fragrances in, makeups, dyes, whatever it might be, just constant tinkering. 

We process about 12 million pounds of pigment a year. There’s about 1.2 million pound capacity. Once a month, this is being replaced. That’s a lot of color. 

This is something that starts in Germany and goes through china and comes through here and goes to a customer, it takes all of these pieces to make it what the customer wants and what the consumer at the end of the day wants. Even this site is all of the U.S. and Canada. So no matter where something is getting colored, whether it’s LA or Anchorage, or Houston, if it’s a brown blend, it’s coming from here. 

Coloring the world brown. (180 shades or more, depending on what the customer wants). at one point they wanted dark browns in the SW. Trends change. LaBrea Tar Pits the museum they have out there is black pigment cause tar pits are black, really, LA, 125 degrees. Point State Park Slabs, the yellow bridges, the bridges were painted yellow for Striking Distance for Bruce willis they painted it that yellow and kept it ever since.

When you curse someone for cutting you off on the bridge, you think hey that’s hello.