Rethinking the future through innovation

Specialty minerals and advanced materials are essential to the products we use everyday, to our homes, our businesses and our economies – from toothpaste to bathroom tiles and electric vehicles to the food we eat.

But growing demand for these essential resources puts pressure on natural systems.

As the world leader in mineral-based specialty solutions, we have a responsibility to extract and transform minerals sustainably over the long term to meet society’s needs. 

Continuous research and innovation allows us to develop game changing products, processes and technologies to help our customers address the major environmental and societal challenges facing the world.

Whether it’s supporting sustainable mobile energy or sustainable construction, developing alternative packaging or more sustainable food production, or designing longer-lasting solutions to reduce materials consumption across a range of industries, we’re continually advancing our product portfolio with sustainability in mind.

This creates exciting new business opportunities to deliver benefits to our customers, communities and other stakeholders that will help sustain them over the long term.

With nearly 2,200 patents, over 30 registered industrial models and approximately 4,000 trademarks, we have a rich history of driving innovation in the markets we serve.

Anticipating and responding to our customers’ changing needs and helping them develop more sustainable products and services for their end-users is central to our approach to innovation.

Innovation at Imerys isn’t just about using natural or hybrid minerals and advanced materials to develop new products and applications – it’s about extending their life cycle and finding new ways to create value and sustainable business outcomes for our customers. By developing new enabling technologies and multi-product platforms, or processing novel engineered materials using temperature and pressure, we’re helping to redefine the future of minerals.

Our global innovation activities are organised around our end markets, enabling us to better understand local dynamics, react faster to regional opportunities, and work more closely with customers on the ground to meet their needs.

And by collaborating with external partners who share our ambitions, we’re able to create even greater value by improving our innovation reach and accelerating time to market for new solutions.

​​Putting innovation at the heart of our business means working with partners across the value chain to bring together expertise in mineral applications and materials science to discover as yet unknown solutions.

This includes partnering with the top universities focused on materials science and other leading academic institutions around the world.

We play a key role in global research programmes, including on enhanced minerals and engineered particles, low emission mobile energy, advanced refractories, sustainable construction and geothermal wells.

Innovation at Imerys is borderless. This means bringing together the diverse skills and collective experience of over 350 talented science and technology professionals through an interconnected network of seven technology centers around the world. It means enabling our people to share expertise, resources and best practice across the Group and collaborate effectively.

​​We have a vital role to play in tackling some of the major challenges facing the world. We’re at the forefront of our industry’s response to the issues associated with urbanization, changing demographics, and climate change. 

We understand that these are complex challenges, often requiring delicate trade-offs and nuanced solutions. There are no easy answers and we cannot address these issues alone.

We’re using our application knowledge, technical expertise and material science know-how to anticipate and help shape more sustainable solutions for future generations.

By investing in innovation we’re creating a more technology-enabled, science-based business, and rethinking our position in the value chain and the role we can play in more sustainable solutions. Sustainability is a catalyst for fundamental change in our industry and the key lever for innovation at Imerys. We’re committed to using our minerals and materials expertise to develop more sustainable and environmentally friendly processes that require less energy and create fewer emissions to meet the future needs of our customers and our planet.

Investing in the future through innovation is key to retaining and improving our industry leading position, responding to the evolving needs of a changing world, and, ultimately, being a more sustainable business over the long term.