After shutting down its drywall manufacturing plant in Cody last year, CertainTeed Gypsum is repurposing the property to produce agricultural gypsum.

The company says it’s aiming to supply agri-gypsum — used as a natural fertilizer and soil amendment — to farmers and retailers in Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota and North Dakota. 

“We are pleased to have a new opportunity to maintain our operations in Cody,” Roberto Margutti, CertainTeed’s U.S. mining operations manager, said in a news release earlier this month.

Margutti said the company is also pleased “to be building our new operation with support from many of the same employees who have worked in our drywall plant previously, who will now help operate and manage the agricultural gypsum business.”

CertainTeed had employed roughly 49 people at the drywall plant before beginning layoffs and starting to decommission the facility in early April 2020. About 10 people are currently employed at the site, the company says, a figure that includes both direct employees and local contractors. However, company representatives say that “new employment opportunities are expected in the coming years as the business develops.”

CertainTeed had initially explored selling off the entire property.

“At one time, the whole thing could have been bought: the building, the rail spur, the mining rights out on the BLM land south of town,” Forward Cody CEO James Klessens said in a January appearance on KODI 1400 AM’s Speak Your Piece program. Klessens said he believed “a couple of big sheetrock companies” considered buying the facility, using it to process gypsum and then shipping the material to manufacturing plants elsewhere. However, “all of a sudden, they [CertainTeed] shifted gears and they decided to retain the mineral rights and control that,” he said on KODI.

A subdivision of CertainTeed called Western Mining and Minerals, Inc. (WMMI) is running the new agricultural gypsum operation in Cody. WMMI says it will use the facility to process gypsum rocks and then ship the minerals out by truck or rail.

CertainTeed’s 2020 announcement that it was closing the Cody drywall plant was described by Cody Mayor Matt Hall at the time as “pretty disheartening” — particularly coming on the heels of the shuttering of Cody Laboratories in 2019.

In his January appearance on KODI, Klessens described economic development officials as “scrambling” to assist some new businesses interested in the Cody area, because “we’re trying to replace those jobs that we lost when Cody Labs left, when CertainTeed left, and the ancillary positions lost throughout the community because of the losses of those.”

However, CertainTeed reopened its mining operation earlier this year and struck an optimistic tone in this month’s news release; it said WMMI “has signed long term supply contracts with customers and is currently exploring other growth opportunities with potential business partners.”

Further, with WMMI not using the entire facility, the company says it “remains committed to exploring opportunities to lease a portion of the unused plant.“

Klessens said on KODI that Forward Cody has had conversations with some industrial hemp companies about using the location for storage and processing.

“We think that might be one of the up and coming potential uses for the facility,” he said in January.

CertainTeed is headquartered in Malvern, Pennsylvania, and is a subsidiary of the building product giant Saint-Gobain, which posted total sales of roughly $4.1 billion between the U.S. and Canada in 2019.