Nephron Pharmaceuticals hosted a Manufacturing Day event Oct. 7, offering local elementary and high school students a preview of what a job in manufacturing could do for them and a look at the progress on its 400,000-square-foot nitrile glove plant.

For the second straight year, Creators Wanted, a traveling escape-room-style exhibit looking to attract people entering the workforce to consider manufacturing, stopped at the company’s West Columbia headquarters. This time, it did so in the parking lot of Nephron Nitrile, which should soon start producing a lot of the protective gloves used to handle hazardous substances.

During a media tour of the facility, Nephron CEO Lou Kennedy — wearing a cowboy-style hardhat emblazoned with the logo of her alma mater, the University of South Carolina — said the plant’s first line, a short segment of which was installed in the last five or six weeks, will be finished by Nov. 7, with the company beginning to sell gloves produced at the facility by Dec. 1.

Though it takes 45 minutes to finish the full manufacture process on each glove, each line in the plant is expected to produce 400,000 gloves per day. Once the plant is fully operational, it is expected to produce 2.5 billion gloves annually.

Before the tour, Kennedy was asked about the need to produce such personal protective equipment when many experts say COVID-19 has entered an endemic phase. She said the demand is still rising.

“More and more industries learned during the pandemic, now endemic, that they needed to be gloved as well,” she said.

On Oct. 7, the facility was still mostly a huge, empty cavern, with work ongoing to ready it for production. But soon it will be ready for regular workers to help produce all those gloves..

Kennedy said the company recently held a hiring fair, with 700 people signing up, adding she’d like to hire 200-350. A previous projection from the company placed the number of employees in the plant at 250.

“Three or four PhDs have already received offers, and about six maintenance fellows came in, they’ve been given offers. We probably made 30 offers just this last Thursday,” she said.

Kennedy touted that the water pulled in for the facility, which she said will come from Cayce and West Columbia aquifers, will be cleaned, with 98% being reusable or sellable. 1% will be lost to evaporation and 1% becomes salt.

“I figured I’d give [the salt] to the deer hunters,” she laughed. “Salt licks for everybody.”

Democrat Rep. James Clyburn was among the speakers during the event that preceded the tour, and Republican Rep. Joe Wilson, who represents Lexington County, was also in attendance. Both toured the facility and talked about the importance of such investments in S.C. manufacturing.

“There are manufacturing jobs growing by leaps and bounds throughout the country. And we are doing what is necessary to make sure that South Carolina benefits from all of that,” Clyburn said, later adding he cringes when he hears people speak of college as the only avenue to success and the state needs to make sure it prepares students for whatever educational avenue and career path suits them best, including those who choose manufacturing. 

“South Carolina has been a leader in technical colleges since the 1950s,” Wilson said. “And so our state is well positioned. And people go to technical colleges to be trained.”