Synthetic turf products used around world
EVANS CITY — Andreas Schulze Ising has a confession to make: He's the president and CEO of a leading manufacturer of polyurethane-based materials, acrylic coatings and synthetic turf products — the fields Olympic, professional and high school athletes play on — and he doesn't like sports.
Don't be confused. Just because Schulze Ising isn't interested in the score of the game doesn't mean he doesn't love his job and his company, Advanced Polymer Technology.
The German-born executive is an engineer by training, and he loves puzzles. In essence, that's what sports surfaces and industrial coatings represent.
The challenge is figuring out how to create a surface that performs best for a particular sport. Once that's done, the question becomes “how do we make this better, stronger and more environmentally friendly?”
Schulze Ising believes those answers are found in the minutia of his business, the chemical reactions that take place at the beginning of the entire process. And so Advanced Polymer's Butler County facility, which does these chemical reactions, does more of them than almost anyone — seven in total.
That may not seem like a lot, but Schulze Ising said it's far more than most companies perform. The biggest manufacturers in the business usually do only one or two because of the time, expense and expertise involved.
“It's like cooking a complicated French meal,” Schulze Ising said. “Most guys just flip a burger.”
The analogy aptly simplifies what APT, which keeps a staff of chemists working full-time developing new products and variations on current products, does at its Butler County facility, which is on 10 acres in Evans City and employs 60 people.
The facility creates polymers for everything from synthetic turf fields to eyeglass lenses.
It's not the glamorous part of a business that manufactures and installs synthetic athletic surfaces around the world. APT has contracts with the Olympics and Penn Relay in Philadelphia — the largest track and field event in the world — and has installed artificial sports surfaces for professional sports teams from the Chicago Bears to Vancouver's largest stadium, which hosts professional football and soccer teams.
The company also installs synthetic fields and athletic surfaces such as tracks and tennis courts for high schools, colleges and universities; and in some cases rehabilitates worn-out surfaces — like the company did in 2012 for Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind.
It's not the type of work that makes APT unique. It's the way the company goes about structuring and conducting itself.
Schulze Ising's philosophy is that APT can and does do things better than the competition — so why not actually do everything involved in the process, from start to finish?
To that end, the company, in addition to manufacturing and creating the polymers and surfaces that athletes and industrial companies use every day, also owns and operates the entire process, from the first chemical reaction to the last foot of surface installation work.
So while APT in Butler County manufactures, say, a liquid binder that's used in the final installation of a turf field, the company's office in Georgia manufactures the turf and the “shock pad” that is installed beneath it.APT also manages a network of independent contractors who install its athletic surface products and controls the raw materials used to create the chemical reactions and synthetic surfaces that represent about 60 percent of its business.APT uses about 30 million pounds of raw material in its chemical reactions each year, Schulze Ising said.The results, Schulze Ising said, stand out. Competing turfs are normally replaced every three to five years, he said. APT's turf products have lasted nine years or more after installation.And the truth, he said, is that's not the end of their useful life. The surfaces are often replaced before they're actually worn out because they're aesthetically displeasing.“We don't know yet how long they'll last,” Schulze Ising said.APT's newest addition to its lineup of athletic surfaces is G-13, a unique track surface that has been the subject of a display at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Science Center.Schulze Ising said the leap forward with G-13 has to do with durability and player safety. The surface also takes a fraction of the time to install and is lighter and gives athletes more cushion than older surfaces do — thanks again to that expertise from APT's stable of chemists.“We're really all about player safety and making surfaces where you can play longer and better,” Schulze Ising said.He called the company's prospects strong. Only about 1 percent of athletic fields in the United States are synthetic turf, said Schulze Ising, so it's no surprise that the industry's annual growth has averaged double digits in recent years.“There's massive growth potential,” Schulze Ising said. “And there's really no other choice if you want to facilitate sports. You're going to spend millions of dollars on field maintenance ... You're either going to play on dirt, or on artificial turf.”Turf and artificial athletic surfaces, while the majority of APT's business, aren't its only business. The company also makes industrial coatings for manufacturers, energy companies and organizations — one of its coatings protects the parking garage of the Pittsburgh Airport — and provides materials called “intermediates” to other manufacturers.It also has created highly-specialized products, such as a protective coating for the Star Spangled Banner housed at the Smithsonian Institution, and specialty coatings used by oil and gas companies designed to withstand wear and tear associated with product transportation and storage.
The diversity, said Schulze Ising, keeps the company diverse but also helps it weather the turf business' offseason, which usually stretches from September to May.The final piece of the puzzle for Schulze Ising is the company's position globally — something that's taken care of by APT's position as part of SportsGroup, a worldwide conglomerate of companies that does what APT does.The global focus has pushed the company to ensure its products — particularly its athletic surfaces — perform above American standards. In Europe, for example, turf surfaces for soccer leagues are required to pass yearly performance inspections that go beyond quality controls that are required in America.“Because it's required in other parts of the world, our systems perform to those standards,” Schulze Ising said. “Generally speaking, we are always trying to make a greener chemistry that is more environmentally friendly.”
