More than $10 million in grants is being awarded across Massachusetts, funding innovators in the state while investing in what officials call "sustainable manufacturing." The grantees, including three in western Massachusetts, were announced in Holyoke Thursday.
Governor Maura Healey's administration says $10.2 million will go to 13 companies and universities via a program devoted to supporting innovation and projects in emerging industries.
The funding comes by way of the "Massachusetts Manufacturing Innovation Initiative," also known as "M2I2.”
Supporting it is the quasi-public Massachusetts Technology Collaborative's Center for Advanced Manufacturing and the state's Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development.
Secretary Yvonne Hao was in western Massachusetts for an event marking the latest batch of grants.
"The goal here is to work together, to fund and invest in really awesome companies, support you all as you scale, help you start here, stay here expand here, and become world leaders solving important problems, like making the climate a better place - solving those really hard problems from here in our state,” Hao said to a crowd of attendees, including representatives from the various companies receiving grant funds.
One grantee, CapyBara Energy, is getting $1.1 million to build an advanced manufacturing facility in the Merrimack Valley, north of Boston, as it relocates from New Hampshire.
In western Massachusetts, SolaBlock of Pittsfield is receiving $204,000 to "construct automated and modalized systems to build its Solar Masonry Units."
The units feature solar paneling embedded into standard cement blocks — boosting carbon offsetting efforts for the construction projects that use them, according to the company's website.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst also received a grant. Totaling $265,000, it will "advance a cold-spray manufacturing technology that can support cost-effective repairs [for] corroded steel bridges."
Receiving the largest grant in the area was Holyoke's own “Clean Crop Technologies,” which is developing an alternative to bleaching seeds and potentially boosting crops as a result.
"The big challenge that we solve is, every year, around 30 percent of food never leaves the farm or field because it is lost to bacteria, molds and pests,” Clean Crop co-Founder and CEO Daniel White told reporters. “A large percentage of those contaminants come into the farm or fields on the seeds themselves. So, we use something called ‘cold plasma’ to remove those contaminants from seeds, before they're planted."
White says tools like bleach can "inactivate" bacteria and mold, but can damage seeds in the process and compromise germination, while also leaving residues on the seeds.
Hitting the seeds with cold plasma in a hopper, however, solves the trade-off a farmer can face when choosing between clean seeds and seeds that are more likely to germinate.
"We basically take gas - most of the time, we take air - and we, basically, add it to electricity, and that combination creates cold plasma, which we can then tune to preferentially break down those bacteria and molds on the seeds, without harming the seeds in the process,” he explained.
With $1.2 million in grant funding, White says Clean Crop hopes to quintuple production by financing the creation of four more machines involved in the seed cleaning process.
It will also translate to at least 15 more jobs, adding to the 15 already working full-time in Holyoke.
It is the type of production expansion MassTech CAM director Christine Nolan says the grant program looks to foster when awarding funds.
“Companies that are expanding on a product line that's really innovative, that needs some capital investment in order to help commercialize that technology, it's often a gap in the investment cycle - a startup, early stage can get some funds, but all of a sudden, that jump to manufacturing is tough,” Nolan said. “And that’s with these dollars are for - to help them with the capital requirements to start manufacturing/commercializing their technology."
With over $90 million invested since its start in 2016, MassTech says the M2I2 program has led to the creation of at least a thousand jobs and over 90 projects being funded.
