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Giving sight to packaging lines

Machine modifications and facility-wide organization help the Lighthouse for the Blind’s visually impaired employees fulfill orders for government and corporate customers.

LHB loading
LHB loading

Maximizing efficiency is challenging for virtually any manufacturing facility, but when 95% of your direct labor employees are legally blind, those challenges are magnified. This is the case at Lighthouse for the Blind-St. Louis (LHB Industries), a contract packager and manufacturer of products provided to commercial customers and the U.S. government.

The organization operates under the AbilityOne Program, governed under the Javits-Wagner-O’Day Act (JWOD). The program dates back to 1938 when President Roosevelt signed the Wagner-O’Day Act into law. It was later expanded to the Javits-Wagner-O’Day Act through the efforts of Senator Javits in 1971. Under the AbilityOne Program, “the government will agree to sponsor or purchase a product from a nonprofit agency that employs people who are blind and legally blind as long as they can produce such product that performs equal to or better than a commercial equivalent in fit, form, and function, and at approximately the same price,” explains Brian Houser, director of sales and marketing for the St. Louis-based Lighthouse for the Blind (LHB).

“We currently manufacture various aerosol cleaners and medical supplies that have been sponsored and are on the federal government’s Procurement List, a list that indicates all products that the federal government has agreed to purchase from nonprofit agencies in the program,” Houser notes. “When any Federal government purchaser needs, for example, bandages or an aerosol glass cleaner, they would automatically purchase our agency’s products, since they were sponsored and LHB is the approved sole source for those items. Understand, we receive no federal or state funding and are not a United Way agency. The government supports our mission of blind employment and the AbilityOne Program by purchasing our quality products, which are proudly manufactured by people who are blind and legally blind.”

Carlo Basile, LHB’s director of new business development adds, “The AbilityOne Program requires that a minimum of 75 percent of our direct labor force must be blind or legally blind in order for the government to sponsor any of our products or services. Our ratio is actually 94.7 percent, the highest direct labor ratio of any blind agency in the country!”

LHB’s services extend to a broad range of products, packaged at both the St. Louis headquarters located in Overland, MO, and at a facility in Berkeley, MO. At the Berkeley facility, LHB manufactures products such as aerosol paints, primers, cleaners, repellants, adhesives, lubricants, penetrating fluids, deicers, soaps, and disinfectants, including some bio-based products. “We produce one of the first 60 products certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture [USDA] to display the USDA’s Bio-Preferred logo on our label. This just occurred last year and is a very big deal for us,” says Houser. About 60% of LHB’s 105 employees work at the 40,000-sq-ft Berkeley location. Further, LHB is not a sheltered workshop, as they pay prevailing wages for their industry. 

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