Back in 1945, when news from World War II was printed daily, paper mills didn’t think twice about shutting down for hours to clean bacterial deposits. They weren’t thinking about the thousands of gallons of additional water this process required. Or the impact to their operations, their bottom line and the environment. This was simply the way things were done.

Until Dr. Stanley J. Buckman, a biochemist from Memphis, Tennessee, introduced those paper mills to biocides, an innovative chemical solution that provided an alternative to shutting down. Applying Dr. Buckman’s chemistry throughout the process kept mills from having to shut down as much, if even at all, saving them untold time and money.

With that one chemical solution, a company was born. Dr. Buckman started Buckman Laboratories on the site of an old lumberyard in Memphis, with a single 50-gallon reactor and a team of five. The first product created was named BSM-11 and was used to control bacteria.

Today, we are still producing BSM-11 for the pulp and paper industry. We’ve also expanded into industrial water treatment and process chemistry, and chemical solutions for the leather industry. But as much as things have changed in the past 80+ years, one thing has remained the same: we are still completely focused on solving our customers’ problems.