Unmade in America

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In early March, as the coronavirus pandemic forced America to contemplate a nationwide shutdown, Dan St. Louis started to get nervous. St. Louis runs a facility in Conover, North Carolina, called the Manufacturing Solutions Center, which prototypes and tests new fabrics and other materials; most of its funding comes from contracts with what remains of the American textile industry. With stay-at-home orders on the horizon, “our business just dried up immediately,” he says.

A week later, St. Louis’s cell phone began to ring incessantly: hospitals, nursing homes, and funeral homes from as far away as New York. Everyone wanted to know if he could find them masks and gowns, or tell them who could, or at least help them figure out whether the personal protective equipment (PPE) they could get was any good. “And that was just half my calls,” he says. The others were from makers of furniture, pants, and shirts, and dozens of other businesses with industrial facilities they wanted to put to use to help shore up the supply of whatever was needed. St. Louis breaks into rapid-fire gibberish trying to mimic the callers’ urgency, and then, chuckling, can’t seem to find the right words. 

“I’m telling you … It was … You couldn’t.”

St. Louis has worked at the Manufacturing Solutions Center since it was founded, in 1990, as a division of Catawba Valley Community College. He keeps a list eight pages long of every kind of test the facility has ever run to evaluate specialty fabrics: filters used in motorcycle cooling systems and clothing that dispenses pain medication, hard casts for bone fractures and nontoxic treatment for raw silk, hybrid sock-tights featured on Oprah. But they’d never worked on PPE before March: “There wasn’t anybody calling us saying, ‘Hey, will you test this stuff?’” That’s because most PPE was made overseas.

North Carolina’s Manufacturing Solutions Center prototypes and tests new fabrics and other materials, working with renewed urgency because of the pandemic.CHRIS EDWARDS

St. Louis’s sudden education began just as governments across the world started treating the looming shortage of masks and face shields as a matter of national security. Germany banned PPE exports on March 4. Malaysia,

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By: Tate Ryan-Mosley
Title: Unmade in America
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/14/1006428/unmade-in-america/
Published Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2020 13:52:48 +0000

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