US manufacturer breaks ground on $700m nitrile glove project

ytheville, Virginia – US nitrile rubber manufacturer Blue Star NBR has broken ground on a major rubber and gloves production facility in Wytheville, set for start-up next year.

The project, which also involves Blue Star-AGI – a JV between Blue Star NBR and American Glove Innovations – includes the investment of $700 million (€620 million) over the next five years.

The investments include building "an NBR production facility that will produce medical-grade nitrile for use in the production of examination gloves,” Blue Star VP operations Bill Mosher said in a written statement to ERJ.

The vertically integrated campus, spanning over 200 acres, will also include several glove-making facilities, the Blue Star senior executive added.

In its first year, the NBR unit will have capacity to produce 90 kilotonnes per annum of NBR, with the potential to expand production over the coming years.  

The first glove factory will produce between 5 and 8 billion gloves per year, with plans to add several additional, similar facilities on the site over the next 3-5 years.

Eventually, the plan is to reach 60 billion gloves per year “as quickly as possible,” Mosher stated.

The company, he added, expects to begin NBR production in the second half of 2022 and manufacture first gloves near the end of 2022.

Regarding technologies employed at the site, Mosher said the glove-making facilities will use “highly automated, state-of-the-art, high-speed dipping lines which will produce up to 50,000 gloves each hour.” 

The plant will be equipped with predictive monitoring, auto-stripping and auto-packing machines to increase the efficiency of the operations. 

Being vertically integrated will also enable the company to optimise product performance and design, according to Mosher.

The manufactured gloves will initially be sold to customers in the US and North America, but the company may explore expansion into other markets as the project progresses. 

“We’ve seen strong growth in the nitrile glove industry for years, even pre-Covid,” Mosher explained.  

The ‘made-in-the-USA’ gloves, he went on to say, will offer customers "reliability and shorter lead times."