Anaheim, Calif. — GW Plastics Inc. is converting a 14,000-square-foot warehouse in San Antonio, Texas, into a manufacturing plant for its growing health care and automotive business.
The site will have 51,000 square feet of production space and external storage when it is complete. A different local facility will be used as a warehouse.
The new plant should be able to house an additional 12-14 machines for the Bethel, Vt.-based company, according to Timothy Reis, vice president of GW Plastics' health care business.
“It won't all come at once, but it gives us that flexibility to expand as we need it. We're going to start with two or three or four machines,” Reis said at the UBM Advanced Manufacturing Expo in Anaheim.
Production in San Antonio is split between the health care and automotive but tips slightly toward surgical devices on the health care side.
The automotive business is focused on critical safety products like seat belts and fuel modules.
“We work on saving lives in the automotive market with seat belt restraints, and we work on saving lives in the health care market with certain critical devices,” North American Sales Manager Anthony Fleszar said.
GW Plastics makes implantable medical devices, surgical instruments, high-volume disposables for diagnostics, drug-delivery devices and medical packaging.
The company has changed warehouse space into manufacturing space in the past.
“It's a model we've done before,” Reis said. “Our Tucson [Ariz.] facility recently did the same thing where we offloaded a lot of our finished goods into an off-site warehouse and converted that space into manufacturing.”