PVP Industries Rocks It With Perlite, Vermiculite

By p.j. heller

Toothpaste. Kitty litter. Outdoor pizza ovens. Ceiling tiles. Garden and landscape growing material. Pipe insulation. Soaps. Environmental spill cleanup kits. Those items and more have one ingredient in common that many people may not be aware of: perlite.

“Perlite is all around us,” notes Michael Dunlavey in discussing a mineral found throughout the horticultural, construction and industrial industries.

Dunlavey is president of Perlite Vermiculite Packaging Industries (PVP Industries), a family-run business that supplies both perlite and vermiculite to customers worldwide. Most of the company’s business – which is roughly 60 percent in the horticulture market, 30 percent in the industrial sector and 10 percent in the construction area -- is within 500 miles of its North Bloomfield, Ohio, plant, although niche sales have gone to Alaska, Switzerland, Bermuda and Trinidad and Tobago.

“We will ship anywhere,” Dunlavey says. “We will service anybody that we can who is willing to work with us.

“Horticulture is still our mainstay,” he adds. “Perlite and vermiculite are extensively used in many, many, many different industries . . . There are a thousand different uses for each mineral.”

Dunlavey, along with company vice president Lenny Maheu and plant manager David Sinn, have spent their entire lives working in the business.

“I grew up around the kitchen table learning about this stuff my whole life,” says Dunlavey, whose father, Paul Dunlavey, started the company in 1984 with Colin Urbanowicz. Production began a year later. The company was launched after Cleveland Builders Supply decided to disband its gypsum division, where Urbanowicz had worked. Dunlavey was an outside accountant hired to evaluate the company’s various divisions. The two men joined forces in the new

“Colin saw a vision that the horticulture industry was going to be the mainstay for perlite and vermiculite in the future,” Dunlavey recalls. “My father was a numbers guy, a CPA, not

Paul Dunlavey became the primary owner in the 1990s and Maheu – who has been with the company since its start 39 years ago and is its longest serving employee –helped the business carry on. Sinn, the plant manager, has been with the company for 37 years. Paul Dunlavey passed away in November 2022.

Michael Dunlavey joined the business about 15 years ago, first working in the plant for two years and then moving into sales. He previously worked doing landscape construction and maintenance for landscape companies throughout the greater Cleveland area.

“I got my first job landscaping at 13 years old because I wanted to get a new bicycle,” he says. “I have a green thumb in my background.”

Today, Dunlavey heads PVP Industries which employs 20 people.