ELM expands bio-based grease processing capacity due to demand

Environmental Lubricants Manufacturing, Inc. (ELM), a manufacturer of bio-based/biodegradable grease in the United States, announced that it will expand its production capacity. The additional bio-based grease capacity is expected to be available by the second quarter of 2022.

According to Dr. Lou Honary, president of Environmental Lubricants Manufacturing, recent emphasis on sustainability by key U.S. corporations has attracted new users of bio-based grease products. Consequently, demand for bio-based greases has increased several fold this year, he said. The company is projecting additional growth next year.

“ELM is the only company known to be using our patented microwave-based grease processing technology for manufacturing grease,” said Honary. “The new plant will represent the future of grease making technology with a first ever one megawatt total microwave generation for grease processing vessels. It will be dedicated to producing large quantities of high-quality grease at revolutionary processing speeds”.

The additional bio-based grease production capacity will be housed in the existing 87,000 sq-ft facility of Environmental Lubricants Manufacturing in Grundy Center, Iowa, U.S.A.

The expansion project “will showcase how the future of the [grease] processing industry will look like. That is eliminating the conventional heating methods that use steam or heat transfer oil. Instead, it uses the magnetic fields of radio waves to directly excite the molecules of the products to be heated to the exact desired temperatures. The energy efficiency and the speed of processing using microwaves is expected to be a disruptive technique for the process industry in the years to come. Importantly it increases the safety of grease processing,” he said.