The familiar fish plants have gone out of business and the Fisher snowplow factory has left the Rockland waterfront for cheaper industrial park land – but FMC Biopolymer and its trademark smokestack and steaming industrial buildings will stay put, according to plant officials.
The plant has been a fixture on the city waterfront since 1936.
Locating a processing plant in Rockland, Maine, to manufacture carrageenan from seaweed shipped from sites around the world makes no business sense at all. Carrageenan is a natural thickening agent used in a startling variety of food products including toothpaste and ice cream. Its unique medicinal properties could become a weapon in the battle against AIDS.
It would make more sense to locate the processing plant in the Philippines, Malaysia, Fiji, Indonesia, Madagascar or Tanzania, where the raw material, seaweed, is located. Even FMC Biopolymer plant manager Mike Stumbo admits that “no one would build a processing plant here today.”
Despite the problems in the industry and worldwide competition, Stumbo predicted that the sprawling waterfront plant would remain on the Rockland waterfront for decades to come.
“There is a significant amount of capital investment and a highly skilled work force here. I can’t see a picture that would justify picking up the plant and moving it somewhere else. If there was a new plant, it would certainly be somewhere else, where the cost of labor was far cheaper. The cost of real estate is irrelevant. I certainly hope it would stay and I don’t see anything that would change that. That’s why we work so hard to stay productive. Our quality and reliability offset the high cost of transportation,” Stumbo said.
Stumbo has been at the Rockland plant since 1991.
The FMC plant is the only carrageenan plant in the United States. The world competition for FMC business comes from C.P. Kelco of California, which imports carrageenan, and the French Company, DeGussa.
In order to stay ahead of foreign competition, Stumbo and his 140 employees must make the expansive 10-acre FMC plant so efficient that it can pay for the horrendous shipping costs to get the 150,000 tons of raw seaweed to Rockland each year.
So far, they have been succeeding. The challenge remains to make the Rockland plant even more efficient.
Health, Safety and Environmental Manager John McGuire said the plant is working hard to decrease high levels of water and solid waste, in order to decrease disposal costs. The seaweed process takes huge amounts of water and leaves a significant amount of sludge, which creates expensive disposal problems. The plant used to send 11 or 12 trucks a day to the Rockland quarry dump. Today, those shipments have been cut to an average of three or four trucks a day and some days are eliminated entirely.
By a combination of chemicals and physical pressing, the plant has removed 70 percent of the water from its waste stream. In addition, some of the remaining “sludge” or algae filter, is being spread on farms across the area, with DEP approval. For weeks at a time, the plant sends no waste to the Rockland landfill, a dramatic break with the past.
The filter waste has worked well on hay and corn fields with virtually no smell, McGuire said. As a boy, McGuire used to make $5 a trip raking Irish Moss in Stonington, never dreaming that he would spend his adult life processing seaweed.
Despite the production improvements, FMC still remains the largest user of Rockland’s industrial treatment plant, paying $1.5 million in sewer costs to the city. The plant is also the biggest user of the transfer station, or city dump. The plant is aware of the city’s financial situation and would not suddenly cut the production process, reduce reliance on city services and cut the city revenues by a million dollars.
“We have to wean the city from relying on that $1.5 million so the costs won’t be shifted somewhere else,” Stumbo said.
The waterfront business has seen some drastic changes.
When the FMC plant opened in 1936 as Marine Colloids, 99 percent of the seaweed product was obtained by rakers operating out of small boats on the Maine and Canadian coast and transportation costs were minimal. Now about one percent of the seaweed varieties are raked on Maine and Canadian waters and the remainder is shipped in from all over the world.
Worldwide, about 50,000 families raise seaweed on minimal aquaculture “farms.” The family operations generate about three times more than any other available cash crop and seaweed farming “can be a very large part of rural economy,” Stumbo said. (See related article.)
Carrageenan is almost impossible to avoid.
Carrageenan is a natural gum used as suspension agent that has application in everything from toothpaste to diet products to medical applications.
The company’s best customer is Unilever, with annual sales of $20 million, for producing such familiar brands as Dove, Knorr, Lipton, Hellman’s, Slim Fast, Ben and Jerry’s, Breyer’s and Best Foods.
The FMC operation guards production information like a high-tech defense installation. A 1987 report indicated that the Rockland waterfront plant employed 116 employees with a payroll of $4.5 million, which produced 8 million pounds of carrageenan worth about $36 million.
Today, the FMC plant has 140 employees with a payroll of $8 million, but production figures remain a secret in the highly competitive field. “It has grown tremendously since that time,” was all Stumbo would say, except to say that carrageenan manufacture in Rockland remains a “good business” despite tough competition.
The company magazine, Biorhythms, reported the Rockland plant manufactured about 30 percent of the worldwide demand of 40 to 45 tons of carrageenan per year, a demand which grows by about three to five percent annually. Biorhythms editor Ted Butz reported that the FMC corporation was on track with sales up by four percent and earnings up by five percent over the previous year.
The basic food and toothpaste industries, which make up the lion’s share of the FMC carrageenan market remain constant, unaffected by the wild fluctuations in the Wall Street Market. About one-third of the Rockland product finds its way into toothpaste tubes, including Tom’s of Maine. The natural product “looks good on the label,” in today’s health conscious market, Stumbo said.
The seaweed derivative is popular with “natural” products since the alternative is a cellulose paper shredded and treated with acid, he said.
The suspension and thickening properties of carrageenan, discovered centuries ago by Irish housewives, continue to expand today, opening up new potential markets.
The latest application is a study financed by Rockefeller University in New York to use carrageenan’s unique suspension properties in female birth control devices to halt the spread of AIDS. The application has been studied for four years and looks promising. The third phase of the study, using 6,600 women in Botswana, will be conducted within the next four years. If the experiment is successful it could mean an additional, small manufacturing plant in Rockland.
The $50 million project could have dramatic results in controlling the AIDS epidemic across Africa, Stumbo said.