A chemistry lab set up in the company

“A successful experiment,” is how Fabio Viola, the director of the Lamberti factory in Albizzate, the multinational chemical company based in the small town south of Varese, simply, but appropriately described the visit this morning (Thursday) by students in the third year of middle school, when part of the research laboratory was turned into a chemistry lab for the schools.

In the presence of the Mayor and of some administrators from Albizzate, the results were presented of the teaching project “A day as a chemist in Lamberti”, which came out of the collaboration between the Group and the town council. The initiative was organised into 10 meetings, and allowed some fourth and fifth year classes from Albizzate and Valdarno elementary schools, and some first and third year classes from Albizzate middle school, accompanied by their teachers, to experience an extraordinary day.

Between the end of February and the beginning of April, Lamberti opened the doors of its factory, to make materials and technical instruments available to the children, for them to put into practice what they had learned at school, under the expert guidance of fifteen researchers at the company, who became their teachers for a day.

The students were introduced to the subject during a theoretical lesson and then, after break-time, they carried out group experiments in the laboratory. At the end of the morning, the participants received a gift of three small books on the main topics covered (matter, energy and the environment), to share the importance of chemistry and its presence in everyday life, with their families.

“The town council has been very pleased to take part in this project, which is the result of the Environmental Agreement between the town of Albizzate and the company Lamberti SpA. Our satisfaction is also shared by the teaching staff and by all of the students who had the chance to participate. Our collaboration has always been fruitful, and we can verify the results. I hope the project will be repeated in future years,” Mayor Francesco Sommaruga said during his speech.

The project fits perfectly with the guidelines recently set by the Ministry of Education, which encourage collaboration between schools and companies and help teachers to plan forms of active learning, with initiatives that spread business culture and give value to technical-scientific knowledge as it is applied.

“It was wonderful to see the curiosity and excitement on the children’s faces as they put into practice the concepts they had learned, and it was great to hear that many entered here with the dream of being a footballer, and left with the idea of being a chemist,” Fabio Viola concluded. “For us it was also an opportunity to tell families in Albizzate more about the Lamberti Group, a scientifically and technically advanced company that has highly-skilled collaborators, and that is attentive to aspects of sustainability as it relates to the surrounding territory.”

A bit of company history, and some numbers. Lamberti is an international chemical group, which is entirely run by the Italian company Lamberti SpA, founded in 1911, in Albizzate. The Group is active in the research, development, production and selling of chemical specialties for industry: chemical additives and auxiliaries developed to facilitate production processes and to improve the characteristics of products, many of which are commonly used.

Lamberti’s chemical specialties come from the application of its strategic technologies (polysaccharides, water-based synthetic polymers, oleochemical derivatives), and are sold in more than 15 different markets, from personal care to textiles, from paper to ceramics, from the building industry to agrochemistry to the oil industry. The Lamberti Group operates in more than 17 countries and has almost 800 employees in Italy.

The Lamberti SpA factory in Albizzate is where the company was founded, and still today, is the company’s main productive facility, in terms of both volumes and technologies used. It is the beating heart of the Group, and is home to many activities that support all of the sites, such as Engineering, Quality, Research and Development, and application activities. The industrial area covers nearly 117,000 m², and there are 400 employees.