LEOMINSTER, MASS. — When Daniele La Posta decided to bring production of his rotationally molded propriety line of lawn and garden products back to the United States, he turned to First Plastic Corp.'s Ed Mazzaferro for advice.
He ended up with a partner.
La Posta had been manufacturing various flower pots and other products in the Dominican Republic for the past nine years.
“I just felt it was time to come back to the U.S.,” La Posta said during a June 10 visit to his new site in Leominster.
The new company is called Allied Resin Technologies LLC, and will use a shortened version of the name, Artic, as an easy point of reference. It will be utilizing about 30,000 square feet of a 76,000-square-foot building that Mazzaferro owns and had used for packaging and storage.
“We plan to develop our line of products — we have good production capacity so we are also willing to be a custom molder for other people,” said La Posta, who serves as CEO.
Besides having its own customized Ferry rotomolder, Allied also has machinery for pulverizing, compounding and mixing to produce the right materials for the products.
The building is set on a rail siding and it has two silos to take delivery of resin. So the company is able to buy resin and then alter the pellets to its own specifications.
“This gives us a lot of control over the process,” said Mazzaferro, who will serve as the chief financial officer.
La Posta has a lot of experience in rotomolding. He learned about rotomolding while visiting Italy in 1995. He later was president of a company in Lawrence, Mass. He then moved to the Dominican Republic, where he partnered with others for a Pottery Collaboration line that was manufactured for use in Europe, Mexico and the United States. He came back to the United States last year and has since been setting up the new company.
