INTERVIEW FEED & ADDITIVE MAGAZINE August 2022 43 ence know-how to deliver solutions based on beneficiation of its mineral resources, synthetic minerals and formulations. Minerals such as moler, bentonite, kaolin, diatomite and more, contribute essential properties to customers’ products and performance, in particular by fostering the emergence of environmentally-friendly products and processes. Our ambition is simple: We want to unlock the sustainable potential of minerals. We recognize the need to act rapidly to provide solutions to the environmental and societal challenges facing the world. You are one of the world's leading companies in industrial minerals. Can you inform us about the production/processing minerals? Where are they used? With 250 industrial sites located in 40 countries, Imerys have specialist expertise in the following transformation processes in order to deliver key properties for our customers’ products and production processes: mechanical treatments, heat treatments and chemical treatments. The mineral solutions and advanced materials we market account for a relatively insignificant portion of our customers’ production costs, but they add key properties to their products—such as purity, crystal structure, size and distribution of particles, shape and specific surface area—or industrial processes by making it possible to reduce energy consumption or accelerate production processes. As mentioned before, our solutions contribute to a vast range of products that touch every aspect of life. A wide variety of industries use our high value-added, functional solutions, ranging from process manufacturing or mobility to consumer goods. We sell our solutions as powders, grains, granules, blends, pastes and aqueous dispersions. Could you tell us a little about your corporate organization worldwide and your role in the global minerals market? Imerys serves more than 15 000 customers in over 142 countries. Our minerals are used as functional additives, providing unique properties to our customers’ products. This includes applications such as personal care, ceramics, food & beverages, agriculture, paper, rubber, paints & coatings and of course animal feed. Our specialty minerals are used as processing aids to facilitate a manufacturing process typically working with high temperatures and providing unique properties to our customers’ products of markets such as abrasives, building materials, foundry, refractory and steel. Animal care is one of the industries you serve. Can you tell us about the solutions you offer under this section? For example; what are the minerals used in the field of animal care? Can you tell us which minerals are used for what purpose, and their properties? For the animal care market, Imerys offers several mineral solutions: bentonite, moler, diatomaceous earth, kaolin, talc and zeolite, all sourced from our proprietary European mines. Our minerals play a key role in a wide range of animal care applications, from technological feed additives in premixes to anti-caking agents, mycotoxin binders and bedding conditioners. With our minerals, we are promoting healthy living conditions for farm animals. Imerys’ bentonite grade, SMECTAGRI®, is mainly used as an aflatoxin binder. It can adsorb aflatoxins Imerys bentonite, Greece
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