By Christina Daniels and Caitlin O’Malior
Your LightHouse Communications team is here to tell you the stories of LightHouse, from student and staff interviews, to stories about LightHouse programs and events, to chronicling the work of different LightHouse departments and satellite offices.
We wanted to learn more about LightHouse Sirkin Center, our light manufacturing plant in Alameda, so that we would be able to better understand the work done there. Just like the programs at our San Francisco, East Bay, North Coast and Enchanted Hills Camp locations, LightHouse Sirkin Center serves the mission of LightHouse: to promote the independence, equality and self-reliance of people who are blind or have low vision.
So, this last Wednesday, we took the Harbor Bay Ferry route from San Francisco to Alameda to visit LightHouse Sirkin Center for a day of listening, learning, and conversation.
We talked to Chris Peterson, Lead/Machine Operator at LightHouse Sirkin Center, who gave us some cool facts about Skillcraft and PRIDEClean, the two cleaning product lines manufactured at Sirkin Center.
For Skillcraft, Sirkin Center manufactures a glass cleaner and an all-purpose cleaner. The bottle sizes are 16 oz and 22 oz. Here are some fun facts about the filling and packing process for Skillcraft products:
- Bottles are loaded into the filling machine and filled with cleaner.
- Next, filled bottles go on a conveyer which puts sprayers on bottles.
- Labels are placed on the bottles.
- A machine puts codes on bottles.
- Bottles are put into a box with 12 bottles to a box then a spacer is placed.
- The box is placed on a pallet.
- For 16 oz bottles, there are 20 boxes per layer and four layers to a pallet, which means 960 bottles per pallet.
- For 22 oz bottles, there are 16 boxes per layer, and four layers to a pallet, which means 768 bottles per pallet.
- The entire process to fill a bottle and get it on a pallet takes 1.5 hours.
- 2388 bottles are filled per day.
While Skillcraft products are odorless and can be used at home, PRIDEClean concentrate is used for cleaning in public and private businesses, and each type of cleaner has a distinctive smell. Here are some more fun facts about the PRIDEClean products:
- Besides each product having a different scent, each PRIDEClean product has a different color label.
- Although the bathroom cleaner has an almond smell because it contains benzaldehyde, it is not an issue for people with nut allergies to use the product because the oils in the product are very refined.
- While most disinfectants must remain on a surface for 10 minutes to kill the COVID-19 virus, PRIDEClean products will kill it within 30 seconds.
Chris’ depth of knowledge about Sirkin Center’s cleaning products and manufacturing was incredible and we were grateful that he shared some of it with us.
We also spoke to Dr. Charles Umo, Assistant Director of Quality and Compliance. He runs the laboratory at Sirkin Center where the mixing and blending of the cleaning products takes place before they are bottled and shipped. Dr. Umo, himself blind, chatted with us about his work philosophy and advancing the mission of LightHouse.
“In my job I have three focuses: customer focus, regulatory focus, and agency focus. For our customers, it’s important to get feedback about the stability and the consistency of products. For regulations, I ask, ‘Are the products safe for the people manufacturing them and the end-users? Cleaning should be safe.’ We cannot cut corners or say we can bend regulations because we’re visually impaired.”
70% of the Sirkin Center staff is blind. Dr. Umo’s passion was evident as he spoke about the agency focus of his job. “One reason I come to work every day is to help blind people to become better versions of themselves. We have in-house training for employees which is done in micro-modules where they learn the processes of Sirkin Center. Our employees can use concepts they learn in these modules at home and apply them to their own private lives.”
He spoke on the importance of developing confidence in blind employees to promote the work of Sirkin Center.
“Negative stereotypes [about blind people] have blindfolded the sighted world. How do we convince people outside the agency that we can do things if we cannot convince ourselves?”
Thus, Dr. Umo continues his work towards driving the mission of LightHouse.
We give a huge thank you to Chris Peterson, Dr. Charles Umo, Spencer Myers, Jonathan Vona and all the Sirkin Center staff for welcoming us with open arms. We know there are more stories to tell, so we will return to Sirkin Center in the future so we can share more about their work with the LightHouse Community.
