Daily CSR
Daily CSR

Daily CSR
Daily news about corporate social responsibility, ethics and sustainability

ScottsMiracle-Gro R&D Unit Manufactures Hand Sanitizer For Front Line Colleagues



04/30/2020

The Corporate Communications’s Director at ScottsMiracle-Gro proudly informed about the company’s associates collaboration to create hand sanitizers for the front line colleagues at a time when raw ingredient sourcing and labour is scare.


Dailycsr.com – 30 April 2020 – The R&D department of ScottsMiracle-Gro in Maysville is well aware of the company’s founder, Horace Hagedorn’s “mantra” which is to ““Find a need and fill it”. As a result, the team’s works rages from “developing innovative lawn” to “garden products and solutions for consumers”.
 
However, to battle the ongoing global pandemic, the team “put their skills” to test to support front workers’ safety, whereby the Director of “Hydroponic Nutrition & Controls R&D” at ScottsMiracle-Gro, Paula Powell said:
“We literally took our R&D Formulation Barn and turned it into a manufacturing operation for hand sanitizer”.
 
The “Marysville Formulation Barn” laboratories are where the team of engineers and chemist work to “develop and test lawn and garden products”. They were approached with a problem that their fellow suppliers were facing which was to find enough hand sanitizer to meet the safety requirements. In the words of the vice-president of the Global Regulatory Affairs, Janelle Restum:
“We pretty quickly dove into figuring out how to make it happen. It’s been impressive to see people come together, figure out how to do this and get down to solving the problem.”
 
And within seven days the team began to ship sanitizer bottles to the frontline associates. Firstly, the team concentrated on getting the “right formulation” which they adapted from a recipe of the World Health Organisation which stated that effective sanitizers need to have minimum 75% of isopropyl alcohol.
 
However, the next challenge remained to source the raw ingredients and the bottles especially when the global market was seeing a shortage for them. It took “a lot of hard work and investigation” to secure the needed materials while they sourced “the 32-ounce bottles” from within its own facilities.
 
The consequent step was to manufacture and bottle the solutions which was completed as a “manual undertaking” by a small team of the company’s R&D associates. Stringent safety measures and “environmental procedures” were followed under monitored conditioned with the use of PPE while maintaining “social distancing”. The quality of the air in the manufacturing areas was kept in check so as to ensure no excessive humidity build up.
 
Following the manufacturing, the team worked daily for hours “filling and labeling bottles”. The last task was to pack them for shipping, as nearly “1,150 bottles were shipped” to the company’s “manufacturing plants and field sales team”. While, the Harrisonville Plant Manager, Missouri, John Hooper added:
“This delivery was really appreciated. We, as everyone else, had been unsuccessful searching online and at local stores for available inventory. Plus, we really didn't want to be out there shopping in all those stores. The hand sanitizer came in the nick of time. A heartfelt thanks from the team in Harrisonville.”
 
 

 
References:
3blmedia.com