Family-owned plastic fabrication company Plas-Tech has swiftly become one of Ontario’s leading suppliers of PPE since shifting focus almost overnight to provide much-needed protective wear and COVID-19 mitigation products to Canada’s frontline healthcare workers.

The company specializes in creating products with see-through materials such as acrylic and polycarbonate.

Hospitals and other industries from the medical field have always been among Plas-Tech’s clients, buying their linen carts and other medical-grade finished products.

It’s no surprise then that the shift to creating protective items was actually requested of Plas-Tech by their clients.

“A lot of them asked if we could pivot and start manufacturing mitigation products, which includes facial shields and guards,” sales manager for Plas-Tech Mike Aube said.

Now, Plas-Tech is making sneeze guards, face shields, soiled linen carts, and replacement lids for existing metal hampers to help support Canada's frontline in the battle against COVID-19, Aube says.

In addition to hundreds of soiled-linen carts, the company has supplied 2,000 sneeze guards and 300,000 single-use face shields.

Plas-Tech presently has orders for a million more face shields, according to Aube, and the company has created a new kind of face shield that will allow them to increase capacity and ship sooner to institutions that are in critical need of PPE.

Plas-Tech supplied these sneeze guards to Loblaws stores in Canada. 

Plas-Tech is the company that supplied Loblaws with the over 1,000 sneeze guards that are now wrapped around the chain’s check-out stations, Aube said.

Spurred by the downturn in donors, the Canadian Blood Services worked with Plas-Tech to attain custom sneeze guards and face shields for their locations throughout Canada so as to facilitate safe blood donations.

And the company has also been working on supplying over one million face shields to municipal, provincial, and federal institutions across Canada, in addition to providing equipment to hospitals, long-term care facilities, transit authorities, and professional care businesses such as dentists and optometrists.

And now that Plas-Tech has pivoted to manufacturing mitigation and other protective facial products, Aube says the company is in it for the long term. It will continue to produce PPE and innovate existing items to give them the protective function.

“We've invented some really unique types of finished products,” he said. “One of which [...] is the new ModiVisor face shield. And as of this week, we're also working on construction helmet visors as well, so that we can help our construction workers go back to work,” Aube said.

This innovative bent on Plas-Tech’s part speaks to the concern that many may have about easing social restrictions and getting back to everyday life after the pandemic.

Many of our current tools, like a construction helmet, certainly will need to be modified to accommodate for the new normal that is soon to set in.

“I think people are going to be a lot more aware,” Aube says, speaking of our collective attitudes as we step back into society after the pandemic.

But for the time being, frontline workers are the focus for Plas-Tech.

We're extremely grateful for our frontline workers and we're happy to be a part of the plan to actually help them with their personal protection of pertinent needs,” Aube said. “We're just really happy to be a part of the solution.”