An international supplier of specialized minerals will develop its first U.S. facility at Ports of Indiana-Jeffersonville to supply Midwest manufacturers with greener mineral additives.

Lumina Sustainable Materials will invest $14.3 million initially at the Jeffersonville port to establish a multimineral processing facility, logistics base, and test laboratory to serve the rapidly growing polymers, electronic glass, coatings, aerospace, building and construction markets. 

Lumina sources minerals from around the world and works with Purdue University, NASA and NASA subcontractors to develop innovative mineral-based products, improve lunar simulants, and research projects involving space travel. The company will remodel an existing building at the Jeffersonville port that has been vacant for more than 10 years and partner with Ports of Indiana to develop a shared laboratory facility for research and educational use by community partners and schools.

The Jeffersonville facility will use the port’s barge and rail connections and serve as Lumina’s processing and logistics hub for the Western Hemisphere. In addition to mineral processing, the site will manufacture advanced polymer additives, including concentrates of novel flame retardants, performance modifiers, and lightweight mineral fillers.

Funded by investors in Canada and Switzerland, Lumina primarily processes anorthosite, a silicate mineral, replacing less environmentally friendly raw materials to produce electronic glass, plastics, paint and fiberglass. The product comes from the White Mountain Mine in western Greenland, which has the largest anorthosite deposit on earth. The only larger deposit is on the moon. Anorthosite will be shipped from Greenland to New Orleans by ocean vessel, then transloaded to barge for transport to Jeffersonville.

Lumina works with allied mineral suppliers worldwide, sourcing pyrophyllite from Canada, barium sulfate from Morocco, bauxite from Guyana, and graphite from Greenland. It is also developing the first vertically integrated manufacturing operations for producing battery anodes from mine to finished active anode material.

The new operation, located at 1302 Port Road, aims to add 50 full-time jobs by 2027 with an average wage of $35 per hour.

“The total value package offered by Ports of Indiana and the State of Indiana is unmatched,” said Lumina Sustainable Materials CEO Brian Hanrahan. “The ability to ship by barge into the Midwest, to leverage logistics facilities and services, and to partner with the port on future expansions and container exports makes Jeffersonville a perfect place for our U.S. processing and research facility. We mapped our target customers for the polymers, coatings, and construction industries, and Jeffersonville is in the center of it all.”