When Beckers opened its new R&D Center in Shanghai’s Songjiang district, the investment was about more than laboratory space. It marked a shift in how Beckers drives innovation for sustainable coatings.

By bringing 20 R&D specialists for coil and industrial coatings into one purpose-built facility in China, Beckers has moved development closer to where customer requirements, performance demands and sustainability expectations are accelerating. Here, solutions are increasingly developed in-market, under local conditions, together with customers, enabling faster response to market needs.

A key focus of the center is Radcure – Beckers’ ultraviolet curing technology. Radcure enables coil coatings to be cured with significantly lower energy use and carbon footprint in coil coating production while maintaining high performance.

“The proof of innovation is sales. China is an important growth market for Beckers Group and R&D plays a key role in helping us bring innovative and differentiated product solutions and capabilities to our customers. The new Beckers China R&D Center is both symbolic of and a key driver of that ambition.”
— Gavin Bown, CTO, Beckers Group

The facility includes dedicated space for customer collaboration, allowing Beckers’ teams to work directly with manufacturers on application-specific challenges. Innovations developed here contribute to Beckers’ global innovation network.

As Benoit Giraud, Managing Director of Beckers China, explains “Customers increasingly expect both high-performance coatings and reduced environmental impact. The Shanghai R&D Center enables Beckers to deliver both, simultaneously”.

This investment directly advances Beckers’ Green Lights Strategy by accelerating the development and deployment of low-carbon technologies in one of the world’s most important growth markets.

By moving innovation closer to customers and decarbonization challenges, Beckers is pioneering performance for positive impact — not only through what we develop, but through where and how we develop it.

Across Asia and the Middle East (AME), Beckers has transitioned to chromate-free primers for coil coatings – not because regulations demanded it, but because the business case and environmental logic were clear. The shift marks a significant step in reducing hazardous substances while maintaining the performance reliability customers expect in demanding applications.

Leading without regulation

In many AME markets, chromate-free formulations are not yet required by regulation. This created a distinct challenge: how to introduce more sustainable technology in the absence of regulatory drivers that typically accelerate market adoption. Chromate-free primers also come at a higher cost, requiring teams to demonstrate value beyond compliance and convince customers to invest in change.

Technical complexity added another layer. Substrate quality and specifications vary widely across the region, demanding primer formulations that could perform consistently under diverse conditions. Without standardized requirements, each application required careful testing, adaptation and validation.

“We can’t afford to wait for regulatory frameworks to catch up with environmental necessity,” says Gavin Bown, Chief Technology Officer, Beckers Group. “This transition shows how sustainability goals and commercial pragmatism can drive innovation together.”

Collaboration across borders

Progress depended on close collaboration between R&D, production and commercial teams across multiple countries. Formulation improvements developed in one market were tested and refined in others, creating a shared knowledge base that strengthened technical outcomes and accelerated learning.

Production teams adapted manufacturing processes to support chromate-free formulations without compromising quality or efficiency. At the same time, commercial teams worked closely with customers, conducting line trials and demonstrating that chromate-free primers could deliver equivalent – and in some cases improved – performance while reducing environmental and health risks.

China played a pivotal role early in the journey. In 2021, the team introduced a chromate-free primer to the AME market, setting a new benchmark. By 2022, China had fully transitioned from chromated to chromate-free primers, driven by a combination of sustainability ambition and regulatory momentum. Other AME markets followed, even in the absence of similar mandates.

Market-driven sustainability in practice

Customer engagement proved critical. Teams invested time in education, performance testing and transparent communication, helping customers understand the long-term safety, environmental and operational benefits of switching. In 2024, Bangladesh completed its first successful line trial with a key customer, marking another milestone in the region’s transition.

The rollout was supported by systematic testing across substrate types and application conditions, complemented by training programs for both internal teams and customer technical staff. Clear guidelines and documented performance data helped ensure consistent results as adoption scaled.

Today, chromate-free primers are becoming standard across Beckers’ AME operations. Beyond the product shift itself, the initiative demonstrates how sustainable technologies can be advanced through market-driven innovation, even where regulatory frameworks remain limited. It has also strengthened regional collaboration and technical capability, creating a foundation for future sustainability-led innovation across Beckers.

Reducing the climate impact of coatings requires more than optimizing existing formulations. Some of the most significant emissions are embedded upstream, in essential raw materials that today rely entirely on fossil-based production. One such material is Hexahydrophthalic Anhydride (HHPA), a key component in high-performance coatings with limited sustainable alternatives currently available.

To address this challenge, Beckers has entered a strategic collaboration with Vancouver-based Anodyne Chemistries to explore a potential renewable production route for HHPA. The partnership focuses on early-stage research into new ways of producing this critical feedstock using renewable inputs, with the long-term ambition of reducing fossil dependency and associated greenhouse gas emissions.

Anodyne is developing an innovative bio-electric platform that uses enzyme-based approaches to convert CO₂ into chemical building blocks. The process is powered by renewable electricity, replacing the energy-intensive and carbon-heavy pathways traditionally used in chemical manufacturing. While still at a research and development stage, the approach represents a promising direction for defossilizing essential coating raw materials.

Research and process optimization are being carried out at Anodyne’s facilities in Vancouver, Canada. In parallel, Beckers is conducting compatibility and formulation testing at its FutureLab innovation center in Liverpool, UK, ensuring that any potential future material can meet the stringent performance requirements of high-performance coatings.

“We are focusing on HHPA because it is an essential chemical for the coatings industry with limited sustainable production routes today,” says Gavin Bown, Chief Technology Officer at Beckers Group. “To reduce the climate impact of our products, we need new catalysts and processes that open up alternative pathways upstream in the value chain.”

The collaboration reflects Beckers’ broader sustainable innovation strategy, which emphasizes targeted partnerships with suppliers and start-ups to accelerate the development of low-carbon technologies where internal solutions alone are not sufficient.

“Our reaction pathway enables enzyme-based approaches that can use CO₂ as a feedstock for key chemical building blocks,” says Manou Davies, CTO of Anodyne Chemistries.

While the work remains exploratory, the partnership demonstrates how addressing climate impacts in coatings increasingly requires engagement far upstream, at the level of raw material production. By investing in collaborative innovation beyond its own operations, Beckers is working to enable future reductions in Scope 3 emissions and build the foundations for more sustainable high-performance coatings.

Beckers is strengthening its environmental performance by embedding Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) automation at the core of how product decisions are made.  This transformation has shifted LCA from a specialized, resource-intensive exercise into an integrated capability that supports faster innovation, greater transparency and more consistent environmental performance across the portfolio.

Previously, conducting LCAs required significant manual effort and time, limiting how often and how broadly assessments could be applied. By automating LCA calculations, Beckers has reduced assessment time from several days to just a few seconds. This has fundamentally changed how teams across the organization can respond to customer requests and sustainability requirements.

The automated LCA system is built on a robust digital calculator that integrates validated secondary data, Beckers’ primary operational data, suppliers’ inputs and internal systems.

This enables fast, standardized and reliable life cycle impact assessments across thousands of products, using a harmonized methodology.

With consistent and comparable data readily available, teams can now assess environmental impacts earlier and more frequently. R&D teams use the tool to compare formulation alternatives, improve resource efficiency and steer innovation toward lower-impact solutions. At the same time, LCA outputs support customer dialogue and downstream Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) requirements, helping Beckers meet rising market and regulatory expectations.

By making environmental performance data accessible across regions, the platform has strengthened confidence and consistency in how sustainability information is generated and used. It also supports regulatory readiness by improving data quality, traceability and alignment across the organization.

Overall, LCA automation plays a critical role in Beckers’ progress toward its 2030 goals. By scaling  environmental assessments, Beckers has expanded its ability to apply robust life cycle insights at scale – enabling better-informed choices, faster innovation and greater transparency across the value chain.