@DR
DuPont de Nemours, the American science and engineering group, has manufactured in Luxembourg since 1962. Its Contern site is one of only two places on earth where Tyvek is made.
DuPont traces its origins to 1802, when a French émigré, Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, founded a gunpowder works on the banks of the Brandywine in Delaware. Two centuries later the company, still headquartered in Wilmington and known for inventing nylon, Teflon and Kevlar, ranks among the world’s leading names in materials science. At the turn of the 1960s the group pushed its manufacturing across Europe, opening sites in Northern Ireland, Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands, and in Luxembourg too. It broke ground in Contern in 1962 on a street fittingly named Rue General Patton, and the first polyester films left the plant in 1964, next to the Sandweiler-Contern railway station, a short drive from Luxembourg City.
The Luxembourg site manufactures two of DuPont’s best-known materials. Tyvek, a flashspun high-density polyethylene, combines the qualities of paper, film and fabric: light yet strong, breathable yet resistant to water and many chemicals. DuPont commercialised Tyvek in the late 1960s, and sterile medical packaging followed in 1972. Production in Contern began in 1988, expanded in 1995, and a further expansion of Tyvek capacity started in 2024. Typar, a spunbonded polypropylene, started life as backing for broadloom carpets and now lines rail tracks, roads and airport runways, holds back weeds and stabilises soil. Between them, the two materials reach electric vehicles, aerospace, personal protection, leisure and packaging, with sterile medical packaging and protective garments among Tyvek’s best-known uses. Around 850 people work at the Contern site.
Tyvek occupies a singular place in DuPont’s global map. The group makes it in only two locations worldwide, Richmond in Virginia and Contern in Luxembourg, which together supply customers across every region. The American parent has kept investing in its Luxembourg base: a recent production line, known internally as line 8, carried a value of around 400 million US dollars. The site has also built an on-site recycling facility alongside its Tyvek lines, shredding and re-pelletising production waste into high-density polyethylene granulates that return to use, including the cores around which Tyvek is wound for shipping. DuPont works with the packaging specialist Sonoco to extrude those cores in Germany before they return to Luxembourg, part of a wider goal of net-zero emissions by 2050[1] . Both Tyvek plants, in Luxembourg and Virginia, now match their electricity use with renewable energy, and the Contern site earned ISCC Plus sustainability certification in late 2023.
