Waste Not In North Oxford | Pioneer, Rain For Rent make our lives a little cleaner
When I ask manufacturers if they make their products here in Massachusetts, “No” is an answer I often get. But that doesn’t always mean those companies have shipped those operations to the lands of cheap labor.
I recently visited Pioneer, a subsidiary of Wastequip company, in the Pioneer Corporate Park off Route 20 in North Oxford. Pioneer manufactures tarp systems for garbage trucks and has been in business since 1958.
Cover All Bases
The company can make a tarp system for just about any type of garbage or refuse truck, from hydraulic-operated systems for the largest Waste Management haulers to hand-cranked systems for your own dump-body pickup.
Chris Nicolazzo, the company’s vice president of finance, said Pioneer does virtually no manufacturing in North Oxford. All that’s done there is some light painting, light assembly, packaging and shipping, he said. As I asked Nicolazzo where the tarps themselves, and the hydraulic and mechanical components were made, I was bracing myself to hear, “China” or “Asia” or “Mexico” or some other low-cost manufacturing nation.
But in fact, the tarps and systems Pioneer uses come to the company from manufacturers in Canada, New Hampshire, North Brookfield and Worcester. It’s easy to get riled up over companies that do all their manufacturing oversees, but it just makes economic sense. So, the fact that Pioneer’s tarp systems are the product of several local and regional manufacturers should be a comfort to the manufacturing sector’s Chicken Littles.
Nicolazzo said Pioneer makes about 6,000 tarp systems each year. Its biggest customers are Waste Management and Allied Waste. The company was originally located in Ware and moved to North Oxford in the mid-1980s.
The Pioneer Park is not an especially impressive place. It’s got large vacancies and portions of it look a little overgrown, but what is there is quite interesting. Just around the corner from Pioneer itself is a company called Rain For Rent.
Wet And Wild
Rain For Rent’s North Oxford location is a branch office of a third-generation family-owned company based in Bakersfield, Calif. The company rents bypass pumps for sewage or freshwater. The pumps are used in waste systems and in culverts that bring freshwater from one side of an obstruction to another.
The company also deals in filtration equipment that helps developers and other entities comply with the federal clean water act.
Under the act, folks in charge of moving water from one place to another, however simple or complex that might be, can’t just pump it into the woods or into freshwater streams or lakes.
The equipment Rain For Rent sells can filter runoff water “down to almost drinking water,” said Greg Pray, the company’s North Oxford branch manager.
Rain For Rent deals a lot with companies or projects that are under tight time constraints. The company says its equipment is often used to aid flood situations and in construction projects that are behind schedule.
Rain For Rent also lists the mining and oil industries as major customers along with agriculture, construction and refin-ing.
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