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BRYAN EATON/Staff Photo. Josh Gray, left, and John Perkins move a giant wheel of silica gel, which removes moisture, to be installed in the unit at the rear. The unit will be used by a major university for archival storage of books and ephemera.
BRYAN EATON/Staff Photo. Dennis Mason encloses an integrated custom air handler that will be used in the manufacture of chewing gum.
BRYAN EATON/Staff Photo. Munters on Munroe Street in Amesbury is celebrating its 60th anniversary.
BRYAN EATON/Staff Photo. Josh Gray, left, and John Perkins move a giant wheel of silica gel, which removes moisture, to be installed in the unit at the rear. The unit will be used by a major university for archival storage of books and ephemera.
BRYAN EATON/Staff Photo. Dennis Mason encloses an integrated custom air handler that will be used in the manufacture of chewing gum.
BRYAN EATON/Staff Photo. Munters on Munroe Street in Amesbury is celebrating its 60th anniversary.
AMESBURY — On Monroe Street in Amesbury, nestled among homes, is the global air treatment headquarters of Munters Corporation, the $500 million company that makes the equipment that puts the snap in an Oreo cookie and helps make the electric car go.
The company, which is proud of its location in a small New England town, is marking its 60th anniversary on Monday. For decades, they have been employing 250 employees in Amesbury.
A worldwide leader in energy-efficient air treatment solutions, Munters employs 2,600 employees in more than 30 global locations. It has had a location in Amesbury since 1978 where workers manufacture and ship trailer-sized desiccant dehumidifiers all over the world.
"When you snap an Oreo cookie, that snap of the outer cover is very dry and crisp," said Scott Haynes, global president Munters air treatment division. "That is, in part, because it was treated with air processed by dehumidification equipment."
A Boxford resident, Haynes recently spoke to the Daily News from his company's global headquarters in Kista Sweden. When not on the road, however, he is happy to be based out of Amesbury.
"I am proud of the fact that we are building heavy, industrial equipment in the Northeast," Haynes said. "We are able to provide a very technical product that also requires the skills of welders and machinists and people like that, and trades in an area of the country where some of that has become a bit of a lost art."
With roots providing dehumidifiers to the U.S. military to keep canned goods from corroding during World War II, Munters' Amesbury employees provide what Haynes calls, "your perfect climate" using their deep drying technology.
"We are building these big dehumidification systems that are drying air to a very low dew point," Haynes said. "We are drying the air down to arctic conditions. You know how it is so dry that your lips get chapped in the winter? Well, that is what we are doing with these dehumidifiers."
Haynes said that Munters recently won a contract from a well-known, upscale electric car manufacturer to provide dehumidification systems which supply the dry air climate needed to manufacture their batteries.
"The reason we call it, your perfect climate is that we are supplying products to companies that are helping to eliminate the emission of CO2 from cars," Haynes said. "And that is just one example."
Also one of world's leaders in drying air for the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, Munters' technology has been involved in the manufacturing process of many popular snacks and candies for a good part of the 20th century. Adapting to the new, mobile millennium, Munters provides indirect evaporation cooling for data centers and server farms which generate online cloud systems, making home computers and smart phones more capable, and cutting down on paper and film usage, among other things.
"Munters is cooling the air that is rejecting the heat from those servers," Haynes said. "They are using our cooling technology which is using Mother Nature, water, in an elegant way. We use water and pour it over a heat exchanger and that heat exchanger is 70 percent more efficient that using air conditioning technology. So we save a lot of energy at the data centers. Just the amount of business that we have done so far in this very aggressively-growing area, the energy savings that we are providing equates to the emission of 30,000 cars."
Lamenting the shift towards a service economy in the U.S., Haynes said that he takes great pride in the fact that his company that is still actively making products that affect millions.
"We are very pleased to be in the area and we have some very strong employees with a lot of experience and we have been growing as a business," he said. "A lot of good people have come into the business from the Amesbury facility and some of them have come along with me on a new journey and have gotten global roles."
"We bring in customers to visit that factory from all over the U.S. and, on occasion, people from around the world. Everybody loves to come and visit New England," Haynes said.
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