500M in N95 mask materials in 28 days from just 2 plants is a really massive number, that’s 17M per day!
Quick BOTEC: 50M essential workers in the US demand 10M N95 masks per day, assuming the best N95 masks on the market today have a 5-day lifecycle. Even if they demanded 50M day, if we increased the number of plants from 2 to 10 (assuming the next 8 have 50% the max capacity of the Braskem plants), this might potentially solve the meltblown bottleneck.
Updates me toward thinking meltblown polypropylene may be more capable of surge than I previously assumed.
If similar labour pre-commitments and coordination mechanisms could be secured across other PPE stages before the next pandemic, this could potentially shift the surge vs stockpile ratio more towards surge.
meltblown polypropylene may be more capable of surge than I previously assumed
Note that this factory was just producing polypropylene pellets, not melt-blown fabric or masks themselves.
The pellets also last ~indefinitely if well stored (no UV, no heat, minimal oxygen, low humidity), and so are well suited for stockpiling. But you’d probably want to move up the chain and stockpile the fabric instead, or perhaps N95s themselves, or perhaps reusable respirators, …
Knew it was a bit too good to be true 🥲 Meltblown PP rolls and facepiece moulds seem like the key upstream bottlenecks to N95 /​ reusable respirator production.
More reason to advocate for pre-securing offshore oil rig-style labour contracts + government compliance (NIOSH) for surging PPE production.
Intuitively, advocating for private companies to maximise production and removing the friction to do so feels more tractable than advocating federal governments to stockpile +5 billion additional N95s. Ideally we should still pursue both
500M in N95 mask materials in 28 days from just 2 plants is a really massive number, that’s 17M per day!
Quick BOTEC: 50M essential workers in the US demand 10M N95 masks per day, assuming the best N95 masks on the market today have a 5-day lifecycle. Even if they demanded 50M day, if we increased the number of plants from 2 to 10 (assuming the next 8 have 50% the max capacity of the Braskem plants), this might potentially solve the meltblown bottleneck.
Updates me toward thinking meltblown polypropylene may be more capable of surge than I previously assumed.
If similar labour pre-commitments and coordination mechanisms could be secured across other PPE stages before the next pandemic, this could potentially shift the surge vs stockpile ratio more towards surge.
Note that this factory was just producing polypropylene pellets, not melt-blown fabric or masks themselves.
The pellets also last ~indefinitely if well stored (no UV, no heat, minimal oxygen, low humidity), and so are well suited for stockpiling. But you’d probably want to move up the chain and stockpile the fabric instead, or perhaps N95s themselves, or perhaps reusable respirators, …
Knew it was a bit too good to be true 🥲 Meltblown PP rolls and facepiece moulds seem like the key upstream bottlenecks to N95 /​ reusable respirator production.
More reason to advocate for pre-securing offshore oil rig-style labour contracts + government compliance (NIOSH) for surging PPE production.
Intuitively, advocating for private companies to maximise production and removing the friction to do so feels more tractable than advocating federal governments to stockpile +5 billion additional N95s. Ideally we should still pursue both