New rotomolding firm takes root to make garden products

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.

“I felt the moment was right to bring it all back to the U.S. We split up what we had and then I talked to Ed about finding a partner and he said he was interested,” La Posta said.

Mazzaferro, who owns First Plastics Corp., a longtime family-owned injection molder in Leominster, said that though Allied will be a separate company, it will allow more capabilities for First Plastic customers.

La Posta said Allied expects to serve a customer base from Quebec to Virginia, and as far west as Ohio and Kentucky.

“We will sell mainly through qualified garden centers, where people appreciate quality and service and who will pay a reasonable price for the product,” he said.

Allied is starting with 17 employees on its first shift, but La Posta said the company expects to add more as it builds toward a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week operation. It has been running product for a few weeks.

The company has 440 molds and a lot of them are double walled, according to La Posta, so plants receive “not too much heat and not too much cold.”

One particularly notable product: Allied makes a 40-inch pot that it uses a 300-pound mold to create.

Both La Posta and Mazzaferro were also excited about other industries that could use rotomolded components and have plans to bring out more products in the coming months.

“We have quite a few projects and we plan to get into other fields as well,” said La Posta.