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Business helps keep things precise and clean

Western Environmental Corporation always has three to five projects going on at once.

Western Environmental Corporation Design Engineer Brandon Fisher and Division Manager, Sales and Engineering Mike White display Thursday, Jan. 12, 2012 on a computer screen a clean room that their international company, from Middletown, Ohio, design and build.

Staff photo by Gary Stelzer Western Environmental Corporation Design Engineer Brandon Fisher and Division Manager, Sales and Engineering Mike White display Thursday, Jan. 12, 2012 on a computer screen a clean room that their international company, from Middletown, Ohio, design and build.

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By Eric Schwartzberg, Staff Writer Updated 12:45 PM Wednesday, February 1, 2012

MIDDLETOWN — Western Environmental Corporation specializes in providing precisely controlled environmental enclosures to customers worldwide.

The business puts together all the necessary parts to create clean rooms where companies may assemble a product to precise specifications, without the chance of contaminating the process with outside factors or materials.

“We do not manufacture anything,” said Mike White, co-owner and division manager for sales and engineering. “We purchase all the components ... and what we assemble here are the control systems, the planning for the controllers for these various enclosures and we supervise all the installations of them.

“We do all the engineering and design work here and then, with our equipment, our technicians will go out and do the start up and the testing after we’ve got everything installed.”

Western Environmental works with a wide array of companies from multiple industries, including the military, aerospace, heavy industrial automotive, micro electronics, components manufacturing, computer devices, nanotechnology, pharmaceutical, medical and universities.

Completed projects are utilized for manufacturing, distribution and packaging. They are also used for precision metrology laboratories, which are used to calibrate and certify manufacturer’s standards and artifacts.

“We provide the stability, as far as temperature and humidity control, particulate control, so they can get these accurate measurements with repeatability,” White said.

Manufacturing and assembling a product in a “clean” environment maintains a product’s longevity, White said.

“Almost everything that you use or touch in the course of a day has been manufactured in some sort of clean room or it’s been measured down to nanometers,” White said. “It’s things you don’t ever think about. Your anti-lock brakes on your car. Those are manufactured in clean rooms.”

Founded in 1983 by White and co-owners Scott Flick and Jim Sibcy, Western Environmental has 13 employees in Middletown and about 35 at its sister company American Cooler Technologies in Michigan. Annually, Western Environmental generates about $6 million in revenues, White said.

American Cooler Technologies manufactures most of Western Environmental’s systems.

Western Environmental maintains several contracts supporting metrology laboratories for the F-35 Lightning II — the Joint Strike Fighter Program — with Lockheed Martin, plus numerous contracts with Caterpillar Inc. and Cummins Inc., a premiere diesel engine manufacturer.

At any given time, Western Environmental has about four to six projects going on, with two or three on the board in the office for design, White said. Each project takes about four or five months to create, including design time, delivery and installation.

On the local level, it created a nanotechnology facility for the University of Dayton, plus clean rooms for the Port Authority in Columbus and Clinical Specialties in West Chester Twp. and Cleveland.

Globally, Western Environmental does business in Germany, Canada, Mexico and Egypt, where it maintains several contracts for that country’s ministry of defense.

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