Werzalit of America Inc. received a new shipment Thursday of one
of a kind presses for a new product line.

Two containers arrived at Werzalit at 8 a.m. from a Swedish
company, owned by the parent company of Werzalit. Dave Foster,
business unit manager-tabletops, said the containers took until 11
a.m. to unload. The containers had the first eight of 23
presses.

The new presses make core plugs, which are used as an axle rod
for making paper. The new presses are specially made to only make
the core plugs. They are the only press of its type in the world,
except for the same type of presses sent to a partner company in
Germany, also owned by the parent company that owns Werzalit.

“When do you ever see anyone moving manufacturing into the U.S.
anymore?” Alan Ramsey, president of Werzalit, said. Werzalit is a
Werz family company.

The presses cost a $500,000 dollars each, according to
Ramsey.

Two men from Sweden are coming to Bradford in the next few weeks
to help assemble the new presses. Parts for the presses are still
being made in Sweden, while the Germany and Bradford companies are
still setting up and testing the new presses they have
received.

Ramsey said the first phase will be up and running by the first
of October, adding by the end of 2006, everything should be up and
running.

Werzalit has a four-year contract to make the core plugs and
plans on making eight million core plugs the first year, and 23
million plugs under the length of the contract.

The new product will go out under the name Polima U.S. LLC,
which is the brand name the product was originally made under.
Because the customers like the name and recognize the name with the
product, Werzalit chose to sell the product under the old name.

The core plugs Werzalit will be making will be about 12 to 16
inches long. These ends of paper rolls are a commodity product. The
cores dissolve in landfills.

“They’re environmentally friendly,” Foster said.

The core plugs are basically a plastic wood.

“People around here think we’re mostly a wood company,” Ramsey
said. “But economically, we’re a plastic company. We buy more
plastic, in dollars, than we do wood.”

Ramsey said 148 sets of tools to run the new presses came in,
and 20 sets of tools are needed to run each machine. The tool sets
are small and portable, compared to the tool sets of other machines
at Werzalit, which are quite large. Currently, the tool sets are in
the metric system and need to be converted.

Ramsey said the new presses run fairly automated. The machines
are fairly new and are supposed to run “lights out,” Foster said.
It will take one or two people to run all the presses once
everything is up and running.

Officials said there’s a large hydraulic unit that runs three
presses in a line. The presses will be located in a single room at
Werzalit, but because of the large hydraulic units used to run the
presses, the room the presses are currently in will be expanded
slightly.

Werzalit has been under construction and expanding in the past
few years. Because of the new presses coming in and more expansions
at the company, there will likely be more job creations at
Werzalit.

Ramsey said the core group of employees should grow three or
four times and gross sales may double. He said the new core plugs
may bring in between $600,000 to $2 million. This will also
increase the amount of wood ground up.

According to Ramsey, Werzalit grinds up about 45,000 to 50,000
logs a day and that may double with the new presses being
installed. Ramsey said there will also be two upcoming expansions
in casket lid production – adding a 10-foot robotic arm to automate
production and also making the box types for the caskets.

Ramsey said Werzalit received $200,000 in low-interest loans
from the state, specifically for job retention, and $150,000 from
the City of Bradford in low-interest loans. He said the North
Central Pennsylvania Regional Planning and Development Commission
in Ridgway also helped in bringing in the new presses.

Because of how quickly Werzalit is expanding, Ramsey told Foster
to quit selling stuff at Werzalit.

“I think that was the first time here that anyone has ever said
‘quit selling stuff,'” Ramsey said.

Ramsey said the Werzalit company has been around for about 40
years, adding the company was quite small until a couple of years
ago when the original family purchased the company in Bradford and
began to expand.

Ramsey said when he first came to Werzalit he asked people on
the streets of Bradford if they knew about the company. He said 95
percent of the people he talked to didn’t even know that Werzalit
was in Bradford.

“We really want to become an active part of the community,”
Ramsey said.