NPE Corner
The best of the best: The Plastics Hall of FameThe Plastics Hall of Fame, which is now administered by The Plastics Academy (Leominster, MA), will add to that legacy during the Society of the Plastics Industry’s (SPI; Washington, DC) NPE 2006 (June 19-23, Chicago), naming eight inductees. The honorees range from a top processor to leaders in materials R&D, researchers at a prestigious institute and university, blowmolding and injection molding machine pioneers, and, finally, a 20th-century management icon who got his start at GE Plastics.
That last inductee, John F. Welch Jr.— Jack, to the business world—took General Electric’s reins in 1981 at 45, making him the conglomerate’s youngest-ever CEO, and boosted its market value from $13 billion to $400 billion. A chemical engineer by education, Welch started at GE Plastics in 1960, running the company’s Noryl PPE/PS blend division.
On the processing side, Peter Bemis, cofounder of Bemis Manufacturing (Sheboygan Falls, WI), is being inducted for contributions over his 31 years, including 13 processing patents centered on coinjection, which the company has used with great success on a large scale to sandwich regrind and other materials in a variety of applications for OEMs like John Deere.
On the materials side, Pak-Wing Steve Chum of Dow Chemical Co. (Midland, MI) and Dieter Freitag of Bayer MaterialScience (Leverkusen, Germany) are being inducted for their research work. In Chum’s 26 years at Dow, he ultimately became chief scientist for Dow Performance Plastics & Chemicals, focusing on semicrystalline polymers. Chum also helped develop the Insite metallocene-based, catalyst-technology polyolefin manufacture.
Freitag’s work in polycarbonates and other areas during his 33 years at Bayer earned him 430 patents. He became chair of the materials research committee and director of plastics R&D, and invented technology used for a modified PC that Philips Electronics would apply as the basis for the emerging optical-media industry.
On the research side, Jack Koenig at Case Western Reserve (Cleveland, OH) and Georg Menges at the German Institute for Plastics Processing (IKV; Aachen, Germany) did their best to forward technology developments from opposite sides of the Atlantic. Koenig’s work with spectroscopic methods of polymer characterization, including the methods to determine PET crystallinity and rubber’s crosslink density, gave designers a greater understanding of polymer properties.
In his 23 years as IKV managing director, Menges has helped the institute become a renowned forum for plastics research, graduating 1500 diploma engineers, employing 400 in research, and partnering with 300 in industry to date. A doctoral graduate from the University of Stuttgart, Menges was named to the Polymer Processing Hall of Fame in 1989.
Innovators and business leaders from the machinery side will be honored, with Robert Schad, founder of injection molding machine, mold, and hot runner manufacturer Husky Injection Molding Systems Ltd. (Bolton, ON), and Gottfried Mehnert, cofounder of blowmolding machinery maker Bekum Maschinenbau (Berlin, Germany) inducted. Both in their early 20s when they founded their respective companies, Schad and Mehnert’s machines greatly advanced their respective processing technologies.
Schad, who founded Husky in 1951 to manufacture snowmobiles two years after emigrating from Germany, moved into machinery manufacturing when presses were unable to run at full output the molds he’d made. His company is a leader in PET performs and packaging machinery, among other markets, and is publicly traded with 3000 employees in 100 countries and annual revenue of $860 million.
Mehnert, along with his brother Horst, founded Bekum in 1958 at 23, earning 40 patents for blowmolding advances that led to the calibration of bottle necks, PVC blowmolding for edible oils, high-output twin-station blowmolding, six-layer coextrusion blowmolding, and the first continuous coextrusion head for autotmotive fuel tanks.
Plastics Hall of Fame induction reception and dinner
When: Mon. June 19 of NPE week, 6:30 PM
Where: Chicago Hilton and Towers, 720 S. Michigan Ave.; ph. +1 312-922-4400
Cost: For a tax-deductible $5000 sponsorship, a dinner for 10 with a preferred table location and program and event acknowledgement is available. Individual tickets are available for $300.
Contact: Kathryn Maguire at the Plastics Academy, Leominster, MA +1 978- 537-9529; kmaguire@plastics.com
NPE 2006
Where: McCormick Place, Chicago, IL, USA
When: June 19-23, 2006
Exhibitors: 2000+
Space: 1 million ft2 (93,000 m2)
Registration/information: www.npe.org
Chicago information: www.choosechicago.com