“We’ve increased our cleanroom space in response to our medical device customers who are experiencing their own production growth,” said Annette Lund, vice president at Diversified Plastics. “The production demand has overwhelmed our original cleanroom and by tripling our clean room space to nearly 1,000 square feet we are helping our customers meet production requirements for their medical devices.”
The new cleanroom features a “pass through” portal, which will accommodate pallet-sized quantities of parts to be transferred in and out of the cleanroom from an adjacent and much larger environmentally-controlled white room. While the white room does not have HEPA filtration, it has positive airflow and all workers wear cleanroom gowns. Many production steps can be completed in the white room and then sent into the cleanroom for final hermetically-sealed packaging.
“We recently formed a medical device production department and quality lab to focus on contract medical device assembly and packaging,” said Lund. “We’ve hired additional people in this area including an experienced quality manager and quality inspector, dedicated to medical device production on two shifts.
In addition to medical device manufacturing in their clean facility, Diversified Plastics also manufactures parts for the aerospace and lithium-ion battery industries. Because production in industries like these often take place in a clean environment, the additional cleanroom space allows the company to better service these and other high-tech industries.
“It’s uncommon to find cleanroom assembly facilities at plastic injection molding companies due to high construction and maintenance costs,” said Lund. “However, with the addition of the new cleanroom, our business is growing. Currently our sales growth is 28 percent above last year. This high growth rate is expected to continue due to the increased cleanroom space. The more space we have, the more business we can take on in the medical device and other high tech industries.”
