Plastics Hall of Fame, Class of 2006

Founders and CEOs Welch, Schad, and Bemis highlight the list of luminaries at this year’s NPE event.

Spectroscopy, coinjection, CDs, and successful CEOs head the numerous achievements of the 2006 crop of Plastics Hall of Fame inductees. Without the eight new members to be inducted this year, the plastics industry might not have capitalized on many opportunities. The Plastics Academy (Leominster, MA) administers the Hall of Fame, whose members are honored in an exhibit at the National Plastics Center. And now the envelopes, please . . .

Robert Schad turned Husky Injection Molding Systems (Bolton, ON) into one of the world’s largest suppliers of IM machines, with customers in more than 100 countries, annual revenue of $860 million, and 3000 employees worldwide. This powerhouse of a company started in a Toronto garage in 1953. Schad immigrated to Canada from Germany two years earlier, and founded Husky to make a snowmobile called the Huskymobile. While this venture failed, Schad went on to produce tools, dies, and fixtures.

In 1960, he designed and built his first IM machine because existing equipment was too slow to run his molds at the low cycle times for which they were designed. That was 53 years ago. In 2005, he retired from Husky, and divides his time between the Schad Foundation, which supports projects that offer solutions to environmental issues, and Earth Rangers, a wildlife/conservation/education organization focusing on young people. Long an environmentalist, in 1993 Schad invited Jane Goodall to provide the keynote speech for a triple celebration: the company’s 40th birthday, his 65th birthday, and the dedication of a new Advanced Manufacturing Center.

Schad’s management philosophies are legendary within the plastics industry. (He told one interviewer several years before he retired that he always wanted to do more than build a company.) Employees have enjoyed benefits such as fitness facilities and programs, massages, an onsite daycare center, and even an annual allowance to buy vitamins. He may have been the first executive to give financial bonuses to workers who were environmentally conscious. Called GreenShares, they were awarded to those who walked to work, bought energy-efficient appliances, and used manual lawn mowers.

Schad came to Canada having spent only two years studying mechanical engineering. Since that time, he has been awarded honorary doctorate degrees from Carleton University and McMaster University. In 2003 The Plastics Academy also honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award.Next up is an industry icon named Best Manager of the Century by Fortune magazine, and who retired only after seeing his firm become the world’s largest corporation. Few in the business world have not heard of John Francis “Jack” Welch Jr., the dynamic former CEO of General Electric (Fairfield, CT) who oversaw the company’s growth from a market value of $13 billion to a $500 billion company. Prior to his stint as CEO, Jack Welch joined GE’s Plastics division in 1960, where he not only ran the division, but also used his chemical engineering background (PhD, University of Illinois) to oversee development of Noryl, which continues to be a billion-dollar sales darling of the GEP portfolio.

Twelve years later, he became the youngest vice president in GE history, and in 1979 became vice chairman. Two years later, Welch became GE’s eighth chairman and CEO, retiring 20 years later at the top of his game. His annual salary was a record $94 million, and his retirement package of $8 million yearly also set records.

How did Welch get the nickname “Neutron Jack”? According to Wikipedia, the name refers to the neutron bomb, as Welch was famous for wiping out employees, yet leaving the buildings intact. In one of his books, Jack: Straight from the Gut, the stats on the “neutron years” show that 112,000 employees left the company between 1980 and the end of 1985. Welch fired the bottom 10% of his managers, and rewarded those in the top 20% with bonuses and stock options.

He also pared underperforming business units when required. Perhaps his most famous management axiom can be paraphrased this way: Be number one or two in your chosen market and you can control your destiny. Other Welch initiatives included Six Sigma, globalization, eliminating boundaries, and e-business.

A third inductee, Peter Bemis, is a third-generation family member/co-owner of Bemis Mfg. and has been active in the company for more than 35 years. He currently serves as president of the Contract Group and executive VP of Bemis Mfg. (Sheboygan Falls, WI). He has received 15 patents for new part design and injection molding, with many in the coinjection area, one reason why his company is so well-known for its expertise in this processing technique. Bemis also helped Milacron to develop an early coinjection machine in 1993.

Estimates of the company’s sales range up to $250 million, and it employs 3000-plus, has more than 10 operations in five countries, and occupies more than 2.8 million ft² of manufacturing, distribution, and office space. In addition to coinjection, it is also considered a leader in multilayer extrusion.

In 1984, Bemis produced its first all-plastic toilet seat, the Model 800, made from HIPS. This remains today along with products such as humidifier housings, lawn tractor casings, and outdoor furniture. Large-part molding is another area of expertise.

Bemis graduated from Carroll College (Helena, MT) with a B.S. in Business Administration and Economics. He is active in SPE, is on the board of directors for SPI’s Midwest Section, and is chairman of the National Plastics Center board of governors.

Remember when Dow Chemical unveiled its Insite metallocene-based polyolefin technology? One of the key inventors was Pak-Wing “Steve” Chum, who capped a 26-year career with Dow as chief scientist of performance plastics and chemicals. Insite was awarded the 2002 U.S. National Technology medal, and became a prolific platform for future Dow products, enabling Dow to introduce at least one new product family per year for the past decade. Last year, Dow sold 1.5 billion lb of Insite-based products.

Born in Macau, Chum recently told a Houston Chronicle reporter that emigrating to the United States to escape poverty, earning several postgraduate degrees, and reaching the top of his profession is an example of the way this country provides opportunity for everyone. He attended Northern Michigan University for postgraduate studies in chemistry, earned a PhD at Oregon State University, and did postdoctoral research at Kent State University. He has received the Herbert H. Dow medal, National U.S. Inventor of the Year award, several R&D100 awards, and the ACS Outstanding Scientific Achievement award.

Dieter Freitag worked at Bayer AG (Leverkusen, Germany) for 33 years, and invented a technology for modified polycarbonate for Philips Electronics that got the compact disk industry started. He has been granted 430 patents in PC materials, as inventor or coinventor, thanks to extensive R&D efforts. Before retiring from Bayer in 2001, he held several positions—head of materials research, director of the plastics business R&D group, and chair of the materials research committee.

While at Bayer, he invented Apec HT, a high-heat PC for automotive lighting and medical device applications. According to a Business Wire report, the products that resulted from inventions of Freitag and his team contributed more than $1.5 billion in worldwide sales for Bayer. He has produced more than 75 scientific articles and presentations.

Following his retirement from Bayer, Freitag joined Triton Systems (Chelmsford, MA) as a consultant, and then became its chief technology officer for polymer technologies. He and his team recently invented a new family of extremely flame-retardant polymers, called FX, that are tough, halogen free, transparent, and heat stable.

A spectroscopy pioneer, Jack L. Koenig created methods for characterizing polymers, several of which have become ASTM standards. Koenig currently works at Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, OH), where he is the Donnell Institute Professor Emeritus in the department of Macromolecular Science & Engineering at the Case Institute of Technology. Before joining Case, he had a brief stint with DuPont.

Koenig invented the infrared method of measuring branches in polyethylene as well as the method currently used to determine the molecular weight of insoluble PTFE polymers—both of which became ASTM standard test methods. He also invented methods to determine the crystallinity of PET and the crosslink density of rubber compounds. But he told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that what really brought his name to the attention of the plastics industry was his book, Spectroscopy of Polymers. It has become the de facto bible on the subject, and many researchers use its methods today. Koenig, one of the first scientists to marry a computer with a spectrometer, was elected to the National Academy of Engineers in 2002.

Initially, IKV (Institut für Kunststoffverarbeitung, or Institute of Plastics Processing) at the University of Aachen in Germany was a small technical training operation. But during his 23-year tenure as director, Georg Menges ensured that IKV would become one of the world’s pinnacles in plastics processing education and research.

The Institute has graduated 1500 diploma engineers and has employed up to 400 people in staff and scientific endeavors. Students and scientists in teams perform research and development work for more than 300 industrial sponsors, which provide funds for the education program. You’d be hard pressed to find any portion of plastics processing that has not been researched by IKV.

Menges studied mechanical engineering at the University of Stuttgart and received a Dr.-Ing. degree in 1965 before joining IKV. He retired in 1989. While at IKV, he developed Cadfiber, a modular, integrated software package that enables the user to solve the problems of material selection, design, dimensioning, and process simulation. He was also responsible for creating a fully automated processing line for SMC parts and developed Express, a program that simulates the behavior of fiber-reinforced parts. He was named to the Polymer Processing Hall of Fame in 1989.

Gottfried Mehnert and blowmolding equipment are synonymous, perhaps because Mehnert designed his first blowmolding machine when he was only 20. Three years later, in 1958, he and his brother Horst founded Bekum Maschinenfabriken in Berlin, Germany. According to Bekum, he can be credited with more than 50 patents and numerous innovations that have become standards within the industry. He is also responsible for developing double-station blowmolding machines, a category in which Bekum is an industry leader.

His background as a toolmaker belies his success in designing and developing blowmolding machinery. Bekum now has five plants in four countries and employs 600 worldwide. Mehnert still runs the company at age 71, but will likely hand it over to his two sons in the near future.

He developed technologies including bottle neck calibration, PVC blowmolding for edible oils, high-output, twin-station blowmolding, and a six-layer coextrusion blowmolding process. Mehnert also created the first continuous coextrusion head for producing automotive fuel tanks.