We create change
Redefining Modern Living
The chair in your living room, the food cartons from last night, the screen you are looking at, and the jacket hanging by the door: the things you surround yourself with every day are easy to overlook, and so are the materials they are made from. Yet each one tells a story about design, performance, and, increasingly, about responsibility. As manufacturing shifts from what works best today towards what we need for tomorrow, these BASF products show how the answer can be both practical and inspiring.
A good chair is designed to last for years. It keeps its shape, stays comfortable, and becomes part of a room so naturally that you stop noticing it’s there. This reliability is no coincidence. For decades, polyurethane foam has made that comfort possible, offering durability and resilience that few materials can match. But even the best chair doesn’t last forever. One day, it reaches the end of the road. And then what?
Until now, most upholstered furniture ends up in landfill, because the foam conventionally used inside presents a big challenge for recycling. It can’t simply be melted and reused. It can be shredded and pressed back together, resulting in far inferior material with very few uses. Breaking it down chemically works in theory, but it is usually too expensive in practice. As a result, billions of sofas, chairs, and mattresses end up at the rubbish dump every year.
Every well-designed piece of furniture starts with a material decision: what it is made of, and what that choice signals about the future.
Bamboo offers a compelling starting point. It is one of the fastest-growing plants on Earth, naturally renewable and surprisingly strong. But as a natural resource, it is not inexhaustible and, on its own, cannot fully meet the performance, precision, and durability expected in contemporary furniture design.
This is where BASF’s Acrodur® is creating change in the market. As a water-based binder system, Acrodur enables the use of bamboo and other natural fibers to form high-performance composites that are lightweight, thin, and robust enough for everyday furniture applications. Built for circularity, it supports natural fiber composites containing more than 75% natural content with no harmful solvents or formaldehyde, and low VOC emissions.
Every well-designed piece of furniture starts with a material decision: what it is made of, and what that choice signals about the future.
Bamboo offers a compelling starting point. It is one of the fastest-growing plants on Earth, naturally renewable and surprisingly strong. But as a natural resource, it is not inexhaustible and, on its own, cannot fully meet the performance, precision, and durability expected in contemporary furniture design.
This is where BASF’s Acrodur® is creating change in the market. As a water-based binder system, Acrodur enables the use of bamboo and other natural fibers to form high-performance composites that are lightweight, thin, and robust enough for everyday furniture applications. Built for circularity, it supports natural fiber composites containing more than 75% natural content with no harmful solvents or formaldehyde, and low VOC emissions.
The moment you press play, everything comes to life. Colors feel rich, sharp, almost real. Whether you’re deep into a film, immersed in a game, or simply scrolling, the experience works, effortless, vivid, absorbing. But behind that brilliance lies a quiet piece of technology doing all the heavy lifting.
For years, the most vibrant color displays have relied on materials containing heavy metals such as cadmium and lead. While effective, these substances come with environmental and health concerns.
Today, BASF offers two complementary, heavy metal-free solutions – each designed for different needs. The first one, QDYES™, is tailored for display applications, enabling a wider color gamut through its narrow emission bandwidth—bringing richer, more precise colors to screens. The second one, Sunvue® color conversion technology, by contrast, focuses on lighting applications, converting blue LED light into high-quality white light with low blue light content and high color rendering (CRI).
Both solutions avoid the need for hazardous materials. In display applications, QDYES provides a cleaner alternative without heavy metals. Meanwhile, Sunvue enables efficient color conversion without additional barrier layers, helping to simplify production and reduce system complexity.
QDYES continues to evolve – in 2025, its performance was further enhanced, achieving more than a ten per cent increase in light efficiency.
So, the colors you love stay as vivid as ever. Only the way they’re made changes for the better.
