The stunning new face of global building materials giant Saint-Gobain isn’t the only monumental investment it’s making in the future. The $80 million under-construction headquarters campus on 65 acres in Malvern is being flanked by a new facility in Indonesia and expansion projects in Wisconsin, New York, Germany and France.

“We needed to demonstrate leadership in building products,” Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics President Thomas Kinisky said of the new HQ in a Plastics News report. “The space that we were in didn’t do that. It was a space we didn’t construct with our new forward-looking, innovative thinking. What you’ll see in the new headquarters is a totally different view of building science, technology and innovation. … It’s a statement about what buildings can be and should be in the future.”

When finished, the main campus is expected to attract 120 more employees to bump its total to 800. Another 42 to 100 new employees will be added to the 300 in Portage, Wis., in support of the $11 million upgrade to performance plastics manufacturing there.

“The expansion is driven by our growth. We have the need to grow, and we have the need to add space,” Kinisky said. “There are a lot of people that moved into contract manufacturing for medical devices, and there are people who came out of automotive and into medical following the growth. But frankly, there’s a question of validation or having infrastructure to do medical components. For us, we have that infrastructure, and the market has been growing at almost double digits for us.”

Indeed, performance plastics is one of the fastest-growing material innovation divisions at Saint-Gobain, with an average annual growth rate of 7.5 percent since 2008.

“We’re getting a lot of attention right now because our markets are growing,” Kinisky added. “And with that growth comes investment. Clearly there is a priority that’s being placed on the expansion of the plastics business inside of Saint-Gobain.”

Read much more about Saint-Gobain’s expansion in Wisconsin and other parts of the world in Plastics News here, and check out VISTA Today’s original coverage of the HQ project here.