161 Hill Ave.
Fort Walton Beach, FL 32548
Tel. 203 543-7978
[email protected]
www.usmeltblown.com

After recognizing that the U.S. supply and quality of personal protective equipment (PPE) is controlled by offshore manufacturers, a new Florida-based company is working to regain control of this crucial safety product by locating its own manufacturing source and supply chain in the U.S. US Meltblown was founded shortly after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic by Robert Sires, an entrepreneur with businesses in several industries including injection molding, aerospace, medical devices and a recently sold cable tie company.

While he and his partners initially planned to manufacture face masks, after learning more about the PPE industry, Sires chose to start up a meltblown plant to supply the critical filter media used in medical face masks to manufacturers in the U.S. “My main focus is making products in the USA—it’s beating China, that’s really what I enjoy doing,” Sires says.

Last summer, Sires located a building in Florida, purchased equipment, and after some trial and error, the plant began running successfully late last year. The polypropylene used in the company’s meltblown is U.S.-sourced and manufactured.

US Meltblown currently produces five tons of meltblown per day, which will soon grow to 10 tons per day following the installation of a second meltblown line. The company has its own in-house quality lab so that it can test every lot, and it also sends its material out to labs to make sure they are tested and pass quality specifications. “We’re only selling material that passes spec, that can be used in an N95 or better mask, even though that’s not necessarily required,” he explains. “What we want to do is put a footprint on it that this is truly a mask made in America by Americans, for Americans.”

Sires and his partners are also considering the installation of a mask machine. “I hate to say this but there are a lot of crooks out there making masks, and we want to make something that really passes muster,” he says, adding that he expects masks to be part of our lives forever. “In Asia, they’ve been wearing masks for a long time. In our culture, it’s going to be part of us, but let’s wear the right masks. That education still needs to happen, and it’s not happening correctly now.”

The company has tested face masks coming in from China, but Sires warns that they don’t pass the criteria to stop the coronavirus. “Ours will, and there’s no upcharge for it—the material can be used in either consumer masks or N95 masks, but we’re making it and selling it at a fairly reasonable price because we think it’s important to do that.”

The company’s meltblown might be used for other applications such as gowns and booties in the future, but for now Sires stresses that there’s still a need for masks. “Even when this pandemic is over, what we want to do is displace China—there’s a huge market for masks—and we would like the U.S. to have a strong foothold into this and not be reliant on other countries.”

US Meltblown’s focus is to support small businesses that are making masks in the U.S. so they don’t have to buy tons of product. “They can buy whatever rolls they need to buy and we will help make them successful. That’s really what our focus is. We’re not going after the big boys to try and hit 20 or 30 million tons a month. We would rather focus on the people who are using one or two tons of meltblown, have a couple of machines and to help educate the industry. The disinformation out there is bad, so hopefully we can educate people along the way too.”