Solid ground for important steps – WACKER donates floor coating for new building and provides training at the Ruperti workshops in Altötting.

While the main workshop in Altötting caters primarily to people with intellectual disabilities, the one at the railway station is for people with psychiatric disabilities. More than fifty people have a placement here. Each is given a task that reflects his or her inclinations and skills or previous job – ranging from electrical installation, metalwork, engraving and laser work to art. The workshop at the station is home to five working groups.

In response to rising demand for places at supported employment institutions, a new 1,800-square-meter workshop is under construction right next to the existing building in Oskar-von-Miller-Straße. “This will give us the space we urgently need to offer more people a rehabilitation place and to support them with training and vocational qualification programs. At the same time, we are creating more rooms for leisure and spaces where staff members can have a little privacy,” said Zumüller explaining the project.

By April this year, the first section of the new building will be ready for occupation. Construction is in full swing. The concrete floors are being installed in the new production rooms and on workshop surfaces. To make sure they are especially robust and long-lasting, WACKER donated one hundred kilograms of SILRES® BS 6920, a low-viscosity binder, to the Ruperti workshops and helped with the installation work on site.

“Our cooperation with the Ruperti workshops goes back some thirty years. They produce different components for us such as pipe clamps, mounting brackets or printed and engraved samples and demonstration items,” said Stephan Haas, head of Communications & Information in Burghausen, at the handover.

Dr. Udo Anders, head of Technical Marketing Construction Chemicals, and Udo Goedecke, Senior Marketing Manager Construction Chemicals at WACKER, were on site for two days instructing the staff at the Ruperti workshops about surface treatment, offering useful tips and helping with the work at hand along with WACKER lab assistant Andreas Schimpfhauser.

The floor covering in the Ruperti workshops was applied with paint rollers and floor wipers in a joint effort. It will literally be a steppingstone into employment for many people with disabilities in the decades to come.