LINCOLN — A London company with a factory in Lincoln thinks it has a solution to two problems brought on by the coronavirus pandemic:
How to protect workers at companies whose customers forget to bring a mask, and what to do with discarded disposable masks that are piling up in the most unlikely places.
MOO, which prints business paper products such as business cards, letterhead and fliers, is producing masks made of cotton paper that go for as little as 35 cents each.
“It’s a single sheet of paper with no plastic, no elastic, so it’s completely recyclable,” the company’s chief operating officer, Nicholas Ruotolo, told The Providence Journal in a video call Thursday from London. “It’s a great solution to the challenges that we face, both the health challenges and the environmental ones.”
And, true to the company’s roots, businesses and organizations can order them with their logo printed on each mask.
The company, which began production last week and started offering the masks for sale on Tuesaday, is donating 5,000 of them to Crossroads Rhode Island, the agency that works with people who are homeless. It hopes to forge similar partnerships with other agencies in Rhode Island.
The public can get its hands on two types of masks — custom printed and pre-made — on the moo.com website.
Custom-printed masks on white paper start at $99 for a minimum order of 100 and drop to 35 cents each for 25,000.
The pre-made masks come in packs of 25 for $29.75. Each pack has five masks in each of five fancifully named colors: Scarlet Red, Candy Pink, Marrs Green, Real Grey and Cobalt Blue.
MOO buys the paper from Mohawk in upstate New York. “Our masks are made of fairly heavy gauge paper to give more protection from spray,” Ruotolo said.
Then, in Lincoln, MOO makes the masks using kirigami techniques, similar to origami, the Japanese art of folding paper, but it also involves cutting the paper. “It creates the ability for the paper to stretch over the ear and fit snugly to the face,” Ruotolo said.
Then, any logos are printed in Lincoln, too.
The cotton paper makes it suitable for a disease prevention mask while also allowing it to be recycled.
“Cotton paper is used in currency,” said Ruotolo. (That is true in some countries; in the United States, currency paper, which is made by Crane Currency in Western Massachusetts, is a mixture of 75% cotton fibers and 25% linen fibers.)
Though both can be made of cotton, paper is manufactured differently than cloth. Cloth involves long fibers that are woven together, where paper is made from shorter fibers that are mixed into a slurry with water and the fibers mesh together as the water is removed.
MOO, which had its first operation in East Providence in 2009 before moving to Lincoln in 2016, had 240 employees before the pandemic hit, cutting that number in half, Ruotolo said. About half of the company’s 550 employees worldwide before the pandemic — also cut about in half — were in the United States.
