Virgin on Business: Makers Mark

We live in a digital world, do we? Ha! Try driving your digital car from your home constructed of ones and zeroes to a grocery store made of the same stuff to buy food consisting of bits and bytes.

Digital has its uses and value in enhancing communication, streamlining commerce and providing entertainment (that is, wasting time). Some are bent on reducing all human interaction and activity to the digital realm.

But out here in the material world, digital is an adjunct, a tool for getting done what needs getting done making new stuff, making new things from new stuff, making what we make more efficiently.

Seattle Business magazines annual Washington Manufacturing Awards, covered elsewhere in this issue, offer a salute to the successes, experiments and ventures in achieving those material-world goals. Digital may get all the glamour. But how well Washington companies master the art and science of developing new materials and using and making existing materials more efficiently and effectively will go a long way to determining what kind of jobs, companies, industries and economy well have.

At Satsop in Grays Harbor County, for example, multiple owners and operators have been stymied in an effort to commercialize a technology that combined wood fiber and recycled plastic to produce a material that could be used in such applications as making food crates. Great idea, but it never quite worked in execution. The plant, equipment and process are still available for purchase, if youd like to give it a try.

In Arlington, MicroGreen Polymers was commercializing a technology to take sheets of plastic, infuse them with gas molecules and produce a lightweight recyclable material for beverage cups. The company had actual product and customers specifically, airlines, looking to cut weight on their planes. What it didnt have was a viable financial model, and eventually an Oregon tribe, its principal funder, pulled the plug.

Aluminum production was long an economic mainstay for the Pacific Northwest, largely because of the abundance of cheap hydropower (the metal having been dubbed congealed electricity). At one time, there were 10 operating smelters in the United States portion of the region. But the age of those facilities, the West Coast energy crisis and, more recently, the collapse of world commodity prices put those smelters in jeopardy. With Alcoas idling of its Ferndale and Wenatchee operations, all 10 will be out of business.

For all that trauma, these are exciting times in the materials business in Washington. The Manufacturing Awards this year recognize two companies involved in the booming composites segment, in which this state is a significant player, and may someday be a leader in recycling and reuse of the material. Other awards are going to a company applying nanotechnology to coatings that will allow metals to resist corrosion, and one developing for the floral industry a material made from the decidedly un-high-tech material of coconut husk waste.

Elsewhere, a Grays Harbor company that makes panels and counters from layers of heavy paper and resin is talking about expansion, a few years after having run into financial trouble. In Columbia County in Eastern Washington, theres a venture to produce pulp for papermaking from waste straw. In White Swan in Yakima County, meanwhile, an idled plant is being brought back to life to make a lightweight wood-resin composite material for furniture cores and other applications.

The goal of that technologys developers is to generate as many as 70 jobs in the next 18 months. Those other projects also represent jobs added, often in locales that could really use them. Thats only part of the impact theyll have; their success means more jobs for suppliers of their raw materials and for the companies that use their products to make other things. Those are real-world effects that will make, dare we say, a material difference for Washingtons economy and workers.

Monthly columnist Bill Virgin is the founder and owner of Northwest Newsletter Group, which publishes Washington Manufacturing Alert and Pacific Northwest Rail News.