New pharmaceutical ingredients manufacturing plant opens in King of Prussia

Monday’s ribbon cutting at the Purolite factory in King of Prussia came a year after Ecolab acquired Purolite for $3.7 billion.

Dan Frenia, who works in Purolite's quality assurance lab, explained to visitors during a tour how the company ensures that its products meet customers' specifications.Read moreJose F. Moreno / Staff Photographer

by Harold Brubaker

Published Dec. 6, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET

Ecolab Inc. a year ago paid $3.7 billion for King of Prussia-based Purolite Corp. as a platform for growth in the traditional drug and faster-growing biopharmaceutical industries.

The problem was that Purolite, with factories in Philadelphia, China, Romania, and Wales, was out of capacity to make more of its tiny resin beads that are used in water purification and increasingly in drugs.

Ecolab is in the midst of solving that problem by opening a new factory about a half-mile from Purolite’s King of Prussia headquarters. The company, which declined to say how much it invested in the plant, had an opening celebration Monday, though the new plant is not yet supplying customers.

The Philadelphia Business Journal reported in May that Purolite was spending $40 million on the plant.

Purolite is also adding capacity in Europe, Ecolab’s chief executive told Wall Street analysts last month.

“There are customers waiting,” Hayley E. Crowe, an Ecolab executive who now runs Purolite, said in an interview Monday. Brothers Steve and Don Brodie founded Purolite, long based in Bala Cynwyd, in 1981.

Purolite, which has offices in 30 countries, had close to $400 million in annual sales when Ecolab acquired it. Purolite has 1,250 employees globally. The new plant now employs 30 people but is expected to have 75 employees when fully staffed.

Ecolab is based in St. Paul, Minn. It had $1.1 billion in profits on $12.7 billion in sales in 2021.

The first product the new plant is expected to manufacture is used to treat people with high cholesterol. The raw material will be shipped from Purolite’s factory in Romania. Those wet resin beads will be processed in a clean room — dried, milled, and screened into uniform sizes sometimes even smaller than the diameter of a human hair.

The plant in Romania is out of capacity for drying the beads, a process that takes about two hours for every 1,200 pound sack the beads are shipped in, an Ecolab employee said during a tour.

“That’s why getting this plant completed was so important,” Crowe said.