SANDERSVILLE, Ga. — Products that you may never associate with our area get loaded on trucks and shipped off across the globe every day.
There is a plant in Washington County called Meltblown, which runs nonstop day and night.
The material that comes out of these machines can help with a simple spill or a real environmental emergency.
Steve Ielasi crunches numbers at the plant and showed WMAZ around.
"I think the population in Washington County knows about Meltblown, but the general population -- no," he said.
It's hard to know what the billowy sheets are that snake through big industrial machines.
"It's a little plastic pellet, a really very small little pellet and we melt it and then it's sprayed out on the collector," Ielasi explained.
The plastic pellets get married with fiber to create the ultimate cleaning product. The material magically soaks up the greasiest mess.
Think of it as a giant paper towel for oil. The plant makes coils or booms. They were used in the BP oil spill that devastated the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
Meltblown went into overdrive to respond to that disaster.
"Well the BP oil spill is nearly nine years ago now and we were running 24/7. We added 100 people at that time for around six months that the spill took to clean up," he recalled.
They also believe in recycling, scooping up scraps from the oil rolls and sandwiching them into long tubes to make the long rolls or "booms."
"People may have seen a boom between two boats," Ielasi said, "they hook together in a big long line and they take it across the ocean and skim it and take the ocean and skim it and take the oil off the ocean like that."
But even though oil spills are few and far between this plant located more than a hundred miles from the ocean, they're always on standby running nonstop and catering to environmental events.
"There's a lot of emphasis on the environment and keeping things as clean as possible," Ielasi said.