Here are two rather related stories that I’d like to bring together. The first is this very interesting article from Bloomberg on the humble nitrile glove, companion to laboratory and medical workers around the world, not to mention food service, security, and more. (There’s an archive link to the article up here). As you might have surmised, these gloves are almost entirely a made-somewhere-else item (at the moment, mostly Malaysia with raw materials from China), and for some years now the US government has been trying to do something about that.
As the article details, that effort began in 2020 during Trump’s first term as one of the many things the coronavirus pandemic made clear about US capacities. It kept going during the Biden presidency, when contracts to several companies were awarded. And as that Malaysia/China mention shows you, there are several parts to this story. As always, you need to start with those raw materials.
For such gloves, that’s nitrile butadiene rubber (NBR to polymer fans). It’s an outstandingly useful substance, used not only to make gloves for for all sorts of gaskets, seals, hoses and so on. It’s more resistant to a range of chemicals and solvents than natural rubber is, and can be produced from simple feedstocks on a huge scale. That link gives you the broad outlines of the manufacturing process: you put acrylonitrile, butadiene, some emulsifiers and bits of catalyst and free-radical sources into a big tank of water for several hours, taking the polymerization along to around 70% before quenching it with a “short stop” chemical agent to clear out all the free radicals and stop the reaction. You recover the unused monomers with steam and coagulate the product with some nitrate and sulfate salts, drying it down to “crumb rubber’ and pressing it into large bricks. You can run this process with either hot or cold water - the latter runs more slowly and gives you polymers with less branching. And the ratio of acrylonitrile to butadiens is of course of great importance: more of the former gives you more chemical resistance at the cost of flexibility, and for gloves you want about a 2:1 ratio of butadiene/acrylonitrile to get good performance in both directions.
Longtime readers will recall some acrylonitrile talk around here before, since it’s also an ingredient in another polymer blend (acrylonitrile/butadiene/styrene, or ABS) that is actually about ten times as large an industry as NBR. Most of the acetonitrile that chemists use as a solvent in HPLCs and for other purposes comes as a byproduct of ABS acrylonitrile production, as it happens.
Then you have to turn those polymer hunks into gloves. That’s a very mechanized process, and you can find numerous videos of it on YouTube (for example). Basically, you have hand-shaped molds of various sizes that are dipped into a coagulant (calcium nitrate for the most part) and then into a vat of polymer solution. There are numerous washing and drying steps along the way, both to clean the hand molds and to clean and set the polymer coatings, and at the end the gloves are mechanically stripped off the molds and everything goes back around. As you can see from that video, it’s a very well-worked-out process, and quite capital-intensive. I mean, that is a lot of specialized production machinery taking up a lot of room, which means that before you make your fortune in the nitrile glove business you’re going to have to lay down some serious cash.
You will already have been doing that to make your NBR material, of course. And there is the rub. There are a few US manufacturers who have set up the whole glove-dip-o-matic production lines, but most companies in the worldwide business buy their NBR in massive bulk from Chinese manufacturers. You can get it from places like Italy and South Korea, in lesser quantities and at higher prices, but as far as I know there is no one at all in the US who makes the material. And if any of the startup US glove-makers want to sell to the federal government, they have to use non-Chinese sources.
The Bloomberg article details an attempted NBR plant in Virginia that has eaten tens of millions of dollars so far and is nowhere near production - in fact, its owner is ready to sell the equipment (probably to Chinese buyers!) and give up. Meanwhile, the US glove-makers downstream of NBR production are hoping for some kind of federal mandate that forces government agencies to buy from them. That seems to be on the way, and the hope is that it will simulate a domestic NBR industry, but who knows? It’ll take years no matter what, and that seems like a lot of capital to commit to a venture that hangs upon a purchasing requirement. There is, after all, an ocean of much cheaper NBR sloshing around out there on the other side of your moat.
Meanwhile, in very-much-related news, Stat is reporting meetings between Trump administration officials and executives from the biopharma, petroleum, and chemical industries in general on the idea of onshoring production of more essential generic drugs. You may recall a particularly ridiculous attempt at this during the first Trump administration, which mostly seems to have been the work of the particularly ridiculous Peter Navarro, involving the Kodak company as the (unlikely) savior of the US generics business. That did not work out, as you may have noticed.
The background in that post on such production is sadly still relevant. It’s similar to the NBR story: overseas producers make these materials much, much more cheaply than they can be made in the US, and they are already entrenched as suppliers to the world. The details of how to move such production back here are necessarily vague at this point, but they would presumably involve combinations of trade barriers (tariffs and the like), government procurement requirements, direct financial incentives, etc. Whether these will be enough, and even if so how long such a process would take, both remain to be determined.
Unlike many things in the current administration, this is not a fundamentally idiotic or harmful idea. But it’s a very complicated one that will require considerable time and money to realize, and it will thus be suitable for people with long time horizons and correspondingly long attention spans. That does not describe the upper echelons of our current government very well. I note that the Stat article mentions that the administration wants to see “substantial changes” by the end of Trump’s term, and that’s going to be very difficult to do. One of the proposed solutions is to at least get some of these processes established in say, Mexico, which geopolitically probably beats having them in China even if it’s not exactly making America Great Again per se. We’ll see how easy it is to sell that idea (both in the US and in Mexico!) But one thing not to forget is that drugs produced in this manner are surely going to be more expensive. I don’t see much way around that. Perhaps that price is worth paying in national security terms, but if someone tries to tell you that that price doesn’t exist, do yourself a favor and stop listening to them.