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Actlabs prepares for growth in new $20m headquarters
(Hamilton Spectator, Lisa Marr, Apr 23 2014)

For a business based on micro-particles, Actlabs is pretty big.

On Wednesday, the company opened its global headquarters, providing dizzying tours of its sweeping 200,000-square-foot, $20-million highly automated facility.

Its Bittern Street building houses the labs that were previously in a set of five buildings nearby in the Ancaster Industrial Park the company had outgrown.

Eric Hoffman, president, said two of those buildings have been sold and the rest would be sold in the coming months.

Actlabs now has more than 1,000 employees worldwide with about 200 in Ancaster.

Hoffman said the new headquarters was built extra big to accommodate another 100 to 200 local employees within the next five years. That growth would make it one of the largest private employers in Hamilton.

Not bad for a business that started in a Brantford incubator in 1987 as a way for Hoffman to try to do something with the ideas he explored in his PhD dissertation on neutron activation — hence the term Activation Labs, or Actlabs as it's commonly known.

Hoffman moved to the Hamilton area so he could be near McMaster's nuclear reactor — the only university in the country with a research reactor.

But Actlabs does much more now — everything from forensic work examining ash particles from fires to determine what accelerant triggered a blaze to being able to determine the amount of gold in a water mixture in parts per quadrillion.

The company now analyzes a wide variety of geological materials, often using its own technologies or processes. About 30 per cent of its work is still for precious metals mining companies.

Actlabs also offers analysis for academic research, exploration, environmental baseline studies for many industries: minerals, petroleum, forensics, life sciences (including pharmaceuticals), environmental and occupational health, agricultural and materials testing.


Read it in full here.