March 2010: EPT Featured in World Trade 100 Magazine

Big Red Sets Up Shop In Michigan

When Houston, Texas-based Environmental Packaging Technologies (EPT) embarked on re engineering project for their BIG Red Flexitank several years ago, it's unlikely the company could have imagined that they would end up moving their manufacturing operations from China to the U.S. - usually, it's the other way around.

According to president Nancy Wendrock, flexitanks are generally made the same way by various manufacturers around the world. However, EPT was looking for a way to improve the process and make a better quality flexitank, while simultaneously reducing human error and manual labor.

"We went to our manufacturer in China and rcquested them to make specific design changes and to use different manufactudng methods,explains Wendrock. And, while the Chinese manufacturer was seemingly agreeable to the request, nothing changed. she says. "They were not eager to change the way they had always done business."

Wendrock adds, “When we started getting so much resistance to what we wanted, we decided to take our future into our own hands and started to look at bringing manufacturing back to the States. Obviously, the first thing everyone thinks about when considering U.S. manufacturing is that the labor costs are going to be much more expensive. But, in our case this wasn’t true because we were going to incorporate more automation.”

Read the entire article about EPT in World Trade 100 (PDF)