MPC Receives $9.3M Grant From Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) For Cleantech Manufacturing Projects

Oro Medonte, ON - In furthering their commitment to empowering cleantech innovators to lead the global path to Net Zero emissions by 2050, Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) has awarded $9.3M to Molded Precision Components (MPC).

The funding is a part of SDTC's efforts to building partnerships that strengthen Canada's climate tech ecosystem, and an overall investment of $44.3M for 11 Canadian climate-tech businesses that are taking climate technology to the next level.

"We're very, very excited about where this is going and we are incredibly grateful to SDTC for their contribution to help us get there," said David Yeaman, President and Owner of MPC.

The funding is to support MPC's new initiative, Pellet-to-Pallet: Green Advanced Manufacturing of Plastics.

As a leading precision manufacturer of components for the automotive sector and with an additional 10 years experience in the medical sector, MPC saw an urgent need for Covid PPE for frontline workers in Canada, and quickly started producing the 100% recyclable Shield-U face shield, with a development capacity of 450,000 shields a day. They ended up successfully providing over 27 million face shields to the Federal and Provincial governments.

This experience opened their eyes to how fragile the health materials supply chain is in Canada, which led them to trace the journey of a plastic bottle (i.e. used for hand sanitizer) through its path through in the system.

"We started with a pellet of plastic. We found that it travelled 30,000 kilometres through 4 companies all across the world. It took about 3 months for that pellet to actually get into a box, ready for a consumer, or sometimes never, during the covid pandemic," said Yeaman.

He added, "Most significantly, it was using close to 5,000 tons of CO2 a year, for just one case." (That's the equivalent to MPC planting 5000 trees every year of sanitizer made in the new industry 4.0 production line.)

The MPC Pellet-to-Pallet program reduces the 30,000 kilometres to just 100 feet. At the same time, they are also reducing the three months of production time down to a mere 18 minutes (that's one bottle of sanitizer every 2.3 seconds), while saving 5,000 tons of CO2 a year on just one line alone.

The next phase of MPC's journey will be ​​building Canada's first advanced manufacturing, medical innovation park, which will have a million square feet of businesses. The various partners will be all vertically integrating, collaborating together, building out anything that is associated with Canada's health security needs.

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Molded Precision Components (MPC)
Molded Precision Components (MPC) is a 125-person firm located north of Toronto, Ontario, that provides manufacturing excellence in the automotive space, making engineered automotive components such as housings, bearings, cable-end fittings and tight tolerance plastic gears. They have accelerated medical component and device manufacturing to their capabilities already making much-needed PPE for frontline workers as well as other innovative medical products.

Already operating under ISO13485 quality protocols, MPC expect formal recognition in Q1 2022, while also commissioning a brand new 45,000 sq/ft facility with a 4000 sq/ft cleanroom to extend their manufacturing capacity.

About Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC)
SDTC is an independent federal foundation that funds companies with the potential to become world leaders in environmental technologies and help solve some of the planet's most pressing environmental challenges, such as climate change, clean air, clean water and clean soil.

SDTC-supported companies have generated $2.7 billion in annual revenues, created 14,628 jobs, brought 150 new technologies to market and reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 19.3 megatonnes of CO2 annually. The world is taking notice of Canada's leadership in clean technology – 11 Canadian companies, nine of which have been funded by SDTC, were recently placed on the 2021 Global Cleantech 100 list.