Although hospital stays are getting shorter, home-care and alternative-care demands are increasing for medical suppliers. Vollrath Group Inc., a producer of blow molded and injection molded plastic medical-care items, is finishing a five-year, $10 million capital improvement program.
The last piece of the improvement is the installation of a $2 million urinal manufacturing cell at the company's Gallaway, Tenn., manufacturing plant.
The cell produces the company's line of lidded, handled, high density polyethylene urinal bottles, which are disposable and 20 percent lighter than traditional hospital urinals.
The cell is equipped with a 12-station rotary blow molding system capable of producing 3,000 of the 1,000 cubic-centimeter bottles an hour, Jim Trautschold, vice president of marketing and business development for the Memphis, Tenn., firm, said in a telephone interview.
Vollrath also has installed five new injection molding presses to make its wide variety of acute-care plastic medical supplies, such as bedpans, specimen bottles and sickroom basins.
Other improvements include computerized controllers, a new chilling system, and side-entry robotics systems, Trautschold said.
The company uses about 15 million pounds per year of HDPE and polypropylene.