Pellet to pallet in three seconds: Oro Medonte company to produce hand sanitizer
By Cheryl Browne
Operations Chemicals
It will take the same amount of time to apply the product as it will to make it.
Most people will spend about 2.8 seconds applying hand sanitizer, yet won’t realize their bottle and contents took exactly that long to go from a plastic resin pellet to the pallet ready for shipping across Canada.
“It’s 100 per cent Canadian,” David Yeaman, president of Molded Precision Components (MPC), said Feb. 1 from the company’s new construction site on the Line 4 South in Oro-Medonte.
“Canadian equipment, with Canadian people, with Canadian ingredients and Canadian components. We’ve brought that whole global supply network into a total of 15,000 square feet. We’ve eliminated hundreds of thousands of square feet of warehousing, plus the shipping, which reduces the overall carbon footprint by 5,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.”
If Yeaman makes it sound simple, that’s because he’s done it all before.
When COVID-19 brought the supply chain of automotive parts to a standstill, he spent a few sleepless nights wondering how to keep the business afloat during the pandemic.
Last March, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ontario Premier Doug Ford asked Canadian manufacturers to get involved in the personal protective equipment (PPE) market, the small company hit the boardroom.
“We started researching shields. And seven days later, we had gone through 31 iterations, through 3D printing and we had a patent pending. We submitted for a grant to Next Generation Manufacturing Canada (NGen) through the federal government ? and we had formed a joint venture with my medical customer Sterling Industries; that all happened in eight days.”
Since then, MPC has sold more than 11 million face shields in Ontario, one million in Alberta and another 15 million to the federal government for dispersal.
“We looked at the face shields as one area where there was an identified shortage from the perspective of front-line workers and employees,” said Robbie MacLeod, spokesperson at NGen. “We had launched an initial call in March looking at exactly that. David at MPC stepped up.”
The new project will add 35 jobs to the local economy when it gets up and running in August. It is expected to produce approximately 80,000 litres of hand sanitizer a day.
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By Cheryl Browne, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, BARRIE ADVANCE
