Missiles aren’t the only thing flying through the air in Ukraine. So says the CEO of Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry (WAF), Sachin Shivaram, whose employees in the company’s Consumer Products division worked around the clock this summer to build thousands of medical sterilizers to be emergency air-freighted to Ukraine by UNICEF. UNICEF placed an order for over 3,000 of the sterilizer units, which are like pressure cookers and offer an economical solution for large-volume sterilization.

 
UNICEF, which has been buying the sterilizers from WAF since at least the 1970s, purchased six 40-ft. containers of 41-quart units and two containers of the 25-quart size, according to Joel Andrew, a WAF business development manager. Normally, WAF ships three or four containers to UNICEF annually.
Even as production was being fulfilled, two shipments of the urgently-needed larger sterilizers were air freighted to get 140 packed into medical kits in war-torn Ukraine, Andrew said. 

WAF is ISO 13485 certified for medical devices, and its topload sterilizers are ideal for rough environments because they’re operated manually, require just a small amount of water to create dry steam, and use any type of non-electric heat to reach the high temperature for achieving 15 psi pressure sterilization. They provide dry sterile dressings and instruments, killing bacteria and micro-organisms in a matter of minutes, according to the company’s website. WAF employees were building about 12 per hour to complete the order.