Hollingsworth & Vose Company

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• Did you know2024

  Hollingsworth & Vose's glass microfiber filtration media — the high-surface-area borosilicate glass fiber sheets used in HEPA air filters — simultaneously provides critical filtration in: hospital operating room ventilation (preventing surgical site infection from airborne particles); semiconductor fabrication cleanrooms (preventing sub-micron particle contamination that destroys chip yields); nuclear power plant controlled-area air handling (preventing radioactive particle escape during normal operation and accidents); and N95/FFP2 respiratory masks (filtering airborne pathogen particles from respiratory air). During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, the melt-blown polypropylene and glass microfiber media that H&V normally produced for industrial air filtration and automotive applications was suddenly in critical shortage because it was the same material needed at scale for N95 mask filter layers. The N95 mask shortage that cost healthcare worker lives in early 2020 was not primarily a manufacturing capacity problem — it was a filter media supply chain problem, with H&V-type glass and melt-blown fiber media discovered to be simultaneously the filter in your car's oil filter and the filter that would have protected emergency room nurses.

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• Concentration2024

  Nuclear power plants require HEPA-filtered ventilation in controlled areas, fuel handling areas, and post-accident filtration systems to prevent radioactive particle release — and the nuclear-grade HEPA filter media that H&V and a small number of competitors (Lydall/Unifrax, Johns Manville, Freudenberg) produce must meet stringent qualification requirements (ASME AG-1 standard for nuclear air and gas treatment). The qualification process for a new nuclear-grade HEPA filter media supplier takes 2-5 years of testing, regulatory review, and utility approval. H&V holds qualifications at multiple US nuclear power stations, making them a structurally irreplaceable supplier for nuclear plant operators: once qualified, H&V cannot be quickly replaced even if their prices increase or they have a production disruption. The nuclear plant's operating license depends on maintaining qualified ventilation filtration — making the filter media supplier's qualification status a regulatory compliance dependency, not merely a commercial relationship. H&V's nuclear filtration position combines the technical specificity of battery separator chemistry with the regulatory lock-in of FDA OTC antiperspirant qualification.

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• Origin2024

  Hollingsworth & Vose was founded in 1843 in East Walpole, Massachusetts — making it one of the oldest continuously operating specialty paper companies in the United States, predating the Civil War by nearly two decades. The company began producing specialty paper for filter bags and wire-drawing processes for the local New England wire industry. Over nearly 180 years, H&V has remained privately held by the founding families, a rarity among industrial companies at its scale (~$800M+ revenue). The company navigated every major industrial transition — from mechanical to chemical papermaking, from paper to glass microfiber, from single-use filters to advanced nonwovens — by staying focused on the intersection of fiber science and filtration performance. Today, H&V filtration media is inside automotive oil filters, hospital HEPA systems, and nuclear power plant ventilation, all traceable to an 1843 East Walpole mill that no longer makes its original wire-mill filter bags but still applies the same fundamental principle: engineered fiber structures that separate what should not mix.

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