Harriet Bean is Senior Quality Coordinator and Process Chemist at BASF in Bradford. Her chemistry career started in 2018 at age 16 when she joined the company as a laboratory technician apprentice. She was fortunate enough to progress to a Degree Apprenticeship in Chemical Science with Manchester Metropolitan University, which she completed in summer 2024.
At 16, Harriet left the classroom and entered the chemical industry. Her day-to-day life for the last five years has been varied but usually consists of making laboratory-scale polymer products for BASF’s production plant or improving existing products to meet customers’ and the team’s requirements.
BASF’s company slogan is ‘We Create Chemistry for a Sustainable Future’, and this has always resonated with Harriet. Before joining the company, she was part of an engineering club where she built a soapbox from a mobility scooter and was able to develop a renewable distillation set-up to produce antimicrobial Marigold oil for third-world countries. Now Harriet is able to take that passion and implement it on a much greater scale; many of her projects include removing harmful additives, introducing environmentally friendly alternative products and reducing the amount of waste produced by BASF’s production plant. For example, she is currently involved in a project to reduce the number of packages the company uses by accounting for the densities of the products: the heavier a product is, the more of it can be loaded into a container, and fewer packages are needed.
Harriet was awarded the 2024 RSC Apprentice Prize for major contributions towards the future sustainability of production plants through improvements to process safety, asset effectiveness, throughput, quality and raising apprenticeship awareness.
