Engineering News

The South African subsidiary of global privately held speciality chemicals corporation Buckman started operating in 1971, serving primarily the pulp and paper, industrial water treatment, sugar and leather industries in this country, on the rest of the continent and on East Coast islands from its base in Jacobs, KwaZulu-Natal.

Eight years later, it moved to Hammarsdale, in Durban, where it has a 2 000 m2 OHSA 18001-rated factory that also boasts the ISO 9001 quality management standard and the 14001 environment management standard.

Buckman’s product and service range includes solutions for various pulp and paper applications, standard and engineered additives for the extra protection of formulated products, microorganism control programmes and hide preservation solutions for the leather industry and solutions for various water treatment applications.

The company’s water treatment products and services include biodispersants, coagulants and flocculants, corrosion inhibitors, defoamers, emulsion breakers, enhanced filter media, ion-exchange resins, microbiocides, organic dispersants, scale inhibitors, sludge dispersants, combustion additives, process chemicals, biochemical oxygen demand and chemical oxygen demand removal, dust control, chemical cleaning and odour control.

The 187-employee company’s factory, in Buckman Boulevard, in Hammarsdale, is equipped with processing vessels, boilers, compressors, cooling towers, chiller units, homogenisers, vacuum pumps, scrubber systems, bulk storage tanks, pumps, a distributed control system and a fire suppression system.