GRUNDY CENTER, Iowa (AP) - Ten years after a devastating fire, Environmental Lubricants Manufacturing has the rails greased - literally.
The soy-based industrial grease and lubricants manufacturer is in a new larger location, with a growing customer base and range of products. One of its staple products is railroad curve greases used for greasing the inside face of the tracks to lubricate the wheel flange and reduce friction around the curve.
Environmental Lubricants Manufacturing, or ELM, now in an 80,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Grundy Center, was born out of technology developed by its founder, Lou Honary, during his 31-year career at the University of Northern Iowa, where he headed the National Ag-Based Industrial Lubricants Program, or NABIL. He also happens to be his product’s biggest and most prolific ambassador, promoting it in travels worldwide and in the profession.
ELM was a completely separate commercial entity with investors and its own financing, created to manufacture commercial-quality products.
“We started the company in 2000,” Honary told the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier . “We couldn’t find any of the major petroleum companies to take the bio products under their wing. So we thought, the best way to prove the concept - that these concepts would be successful and make money - is to just show it in a company.
“I know the dean of the (UNI) College of Business,” at that time, Bill Greer, “said, ’Are you crazy?’ I said, ’We can license products and get a lot of money by licensing, but if people don’t sell it, the farmers are not going to see a benefit.’ I’ve always been focused on making sure we show the actual value-adding opportunities for farmers and keep some of that money in our state.”
ELM located in Plainfield in 2003 then moved to Cedar Falls. In 2007, ELM was featured in the Inc. Magazine’s annual survey as the 470th fastest growing private company in the U.S. On March 20 that same year, a heat transfer oil fire in the grease processing plant in Plainfield destroyed ELM’s fledgling business.
“That really screwed us up,” Honary said. “God knows what we would have done by now” had the company’s spiking growth rate not been interrupted. The firm temporarily leased space in the Cedar Falls Industrial Park.
“But all wasn’t bad in the long run. The farmers and the country may benefit even more from what we were able to do. I came back and started researching alternative ways of heating products to make the grease.”
He began researching using microwave heat. Honary and a colleague at UNI, Wes James, now employed at the Cedar Valley TechWorks in downtown Waterloo, eventually came up with a never-done-before way of using microwaves to process the grease and eliminate the dangers of heat transfer oils for good. These processes are no different than heating milk, Honary explained. When cooking milk on the stove, you heat the bottom of the pot and have to constantly stir so the bottom does not burn. The energy saving and speed of processing improved several times.
“The conventional way of making grease takes 12 hours to do a 200-gallon batch. The microwave takes three hours to do a 500-gallon batch,” Honary said.
The microwave grease processing started in a new ELM location in 2010 in the present location in Grundy Center, the site of the former Norwesco Contract Manufacturing plant that closed in 2009. The 87,000-square-foot facility has an extensive sprinkler system and is large enough to accommodate ELM’s expected growth.
Honary has published papers and presented at many international conferences on the making of soybean-based lubricants in microwaves. The technology also was featured in a “Modern Marvels” program segment by the History Channel and is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giQh7aGO4FQ .
Two of the largest grease equipment manufacturers in the U.S. and Canada are currently working with ELM to adapt their existing grease processing reactors to the microwave heating method, Honary said.
“I’ve been going all over the world presenting this,” Honary said. “I was in Russia just last month. I was in Finland in April. I’ve presented it all over Europe, and I’ve had several presentations in the U.S. The energy saving is tremendous. The safety is much, much better.
“Last month we had four Japanese engineers at our facility for a week to learn about our products and microwave processing and the differences between petroleum and vegetable oil-based lubricants,” Honary said. “We have had visitors from India, Europe and many U.S. companies to observe firsthand how the microwave processing works.”
But Honary prefers to focus on the grease technology and the products, rather than the manufacturing technology. “But that concept is so huge that it pulls a third of my energy into it. I can’t avoid it.
“But my baby is still the bio-based lubricants,” he said. “This is not something where I’m looking for $5 million to $10 million in sales and say I’m happy. That’s not the goal. Our ELM goal is to convert maybe 5 percent of the $40 billion a year (U.S.) lubricant market to soybean-based lubricants. Then I can claim the circle is complete,” from when the research began on the UNI campus in 1991.
Other products and applications for ELM include:
Truck grease that often melts and ends up in ditches on roadsides.
Wire rope greases used on ships and shipyards that come in contact with water.
Drill rod greases used in mining where thousands of feet of drill rods are greased daily, and the grease is washed off into the environment.
Marine applications where boaters grease joints that are in direct contact with water.
Food processing applications where grease could come in contact with foods.
Elevator hydraulic systems where any leak is directly lost to the environment.
Metal-cutting applications where the oil mist could cause health hazards for workers.
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Information from: Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, http://www.wcfcourier.com
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