Worcester Business Journal

14 Worcester Business Journal | April 13, 2020 | wbjournal.com Joining the coronavirus fight Manufacturers across Central Mass. have dropped their normal operations to make new products in the COVID-19 crisis Garden Remedies (above) a Fitchburg cannabis producer, is making more than 100 gallons of hand sanitizer a week to donate to the Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association. M A N U F A C T U R I N G FOCUS F or more than half a century, the Spencer manufacturer FLEXcon has been focused on making films and adhesives whose origins consumers might not think too much about. ese days, the company is working on crank- ing out something it's never made before: Face shields for hospital workers. Within 36 hours being contacted by area hospitals looking for help, FLEXcon CEO Lavon Winkler said, the company was already producing the first masks of what it expects will eventually number in the millions. BY GRANT WELKER Worcester Business Journal News Editor "We had a team of people who got in a room and started brainstorming," Winkler said. "We had never made a face shield." FLEXcon isn't alone among Cen- tral Massachusetts manufacturers and other companies quickly pivoting from making their usual products to making masks and hand sanitizer to aid in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. e Gov. Charlie Baker Adminis- tration has leaned on the state's manu- facturers, creating the Manufacturing Emergency Response Team under the Massachusetts Technology Collabora- tive to coordinate manufacturers' move toward pandemic-related materials. e effort has been broad. In Fitchburg, cannabis producers Rev- olutionary Clinics and Garden Remedies have both quickly gone from growing and producing cannabis products to making hundreds of gallons of sanitiz- er. Nashoba Valley Spirits in Bolton is cranking out sanitizer, too – enough in one week, the company said, for 1 million hand washes. Sparx Hockey in Acton, which normally makes ice-skate-sharpening equip- ment, quickly found the ma- terial and know-how to make masks. And a similar effort is taking place at Worcester's Technocopia, a makerspace for startups whose facility is closed but whose members are pitching in from home. Learning a new craft For Russ Layton, the founder of Sparx, making plastic face shields didn't come naturally. Layton grew up playing hockey and parlayed his passion for the sport and talent for engineering and entrepreneurship into a company on Inc. 5000's list of the fastest growing private companies, last year landing at 56th in America. Sparx has had a lot of limitations. Little of the company's equipment was made for masks. It couldn't secure enough foam and didn't have a blueprint for how to manufacture a mask. But Sparx has lasers for cutting metal, which it has used to cut acrylic to make buckles. A friend of Layton's in Maine knew a local maker of foam, connecting the two to give Sparx another needed component for masks. And Bauer Hock- ey, a New Hampshire company that's normally a competitor, shared publicly the instructions for making masks. "Everyone is sharing their specifica- tions and their supply chains," Layton said, contrasting today's way of oper- ating to the more guarded way of normally doing business. "What's different is that demand is so high that not a single one of us could possibly meet it." In a labor intensive process, Sparx has been able to make 10,000 shields a week and is working on making headwear for coronavirus patients who are receiving help breathing through a tube to better protect their caregivers. "It's incredibly manual," Layton said of the process. "No automation. And everyone has to be six feet apart with masks on." Revolutionary Clinics and Garden Remedies each had an easier time switching to making sanitizer. ey both already had ethanol for making cannabis oil products, as well as the right certified equipment for working with the poten- tially combustive material. e companies just needed to get a few World Health Organization-certified ingredients – mainly alcohol, glycerin and aloe – and they were able to start Lavon Winkler, FLEXcon CEO Fitchburg cannabis producer Revolutionary Clinics, still continues making such products for its medicinal-marijuana business, but has shifted to making hand sanitizer as well.

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