Many companies have adapted their manufacturing capital and processes to produce masks, face shields and other personal protective equipment (PPE) to meet the critical needs of front-line workers battling the COVID-19 pandemic.
Based in Goshen, Ind., GDC Inc. is a manufacturer specializing in die-cuts, shields, baffles and melt-blown acoustical insulation used by the automotive industry, including GM, Ford, Fiat Chrysler and Tesla. GDC production engineers have recently discovered how to repurpose melt-blown insulation production lines to produce hydrophobic filtration media for surgical masks. This filtration media has the added benefit of being negatively charged to attract microbes and trap them more effectively.
“Our automotive partners reached out for assistance in making surgical masks, and we have been able to provide the filtration media requested by both Ford and GM,” said Andy Kitson, GDC director of sales. “While the two automotive manufacturers are ramping-up to produce hundreds of thousands of surgical masks, GDC is currently capable of producing enough material for six million masks a day.”
GDC also reached out to local health-care workers and asked how the company could help meet their specific needs. Within 24 hours, the company created a prototype of a requested face shield.
“Our objective was to meet the needs of local health-care workers by making an effective, low-cost face shield,” said Kitson, whose company has the current capacity to produce 45,000 such shields a day. “We made a few calls and quickly had an order for 60,000 shields from the state of Indiana. We have responded to the increased demand by securing the additional raw materials necessary to improve our output. We’re now positioned to provide hundreds of thousands of shields to Indiana in the coming months.”
More than 150 GDC employees have been working around the clock, seven days a week, altering production processes to facilitate the manufacture of filtration media and face shields. As more needs are identified, GDC will continue to explore its capabilities to assist in the fight against the COVID-19 global pandemic.
