Clariant To Leave Frankfurt Site

After a three-month study of its operations at Germany's Frankfurt-Griesheim industrial park, Swiss specialty chemicals firm Clariant will close its last plant there, a facility producing dichlorobenzidine. According to Henri Schlömer, managing director of Clariant in Germany, the 53 employees affected will be reassigned within the company wherever possible. The closure marks the end of an era: In the mid-1980s, Hoechst employed about 3,000 at the site, and Clariant took about 1,100 of those employees when it was spun off from the German chemical giant in 1997. Chemical-related companies still employ about 1,500 people at the site.