Spotlight: Plastics Unlimited, Preston, IowaSpotlight: Plastics Unlimited, Preston, Iowa

Preston, IA is better known for its vast farms, with acres of corn and soybeans, than it is for plastics. But one husband-and- wife team found a way to blend farming and plastics, creating a successful business despite what might seem an odd mix.

Terry and Nancy Kieffer at one time farmed a thousand acres in Iowa, but then Terry needed back surgery and Nancy was diagnosed with a pituitary tumor. While it was difficult for them to make the decision to quit farming, they knew they had to do something different.

In 1993, the Kieffers bought a thermoforming machine at an auction, and put it in a shed on the farm after pouring concrete over the shed’s dirt floor. Together they took a class on thermoforming given by Jim Throne, and soon discovered they were the youngest company in the room.

“We really learned the process by trial and error,” said Nancy Kieffer at the recent SPE Thermoforming conference, where the couple had entered one of their large parts in the competition.

Plastics Unlimited, the name of the firm they founded in 1993, has proven its reputation as a winner. In 2005, the company received multiple awards from the Society of Plastics Engineers Thermoforming Division, including winning, with a tractor side panel, the ‘Thermoformed and Other Process’ award in that group’s parts competitions. It won the 2005 Process Innovation Award for Composite Excellence from the American Composites Manufacturers Assn., and the Iowa Venture Award from the Iowa Area Development Group.

It’s evident from the rapid growth of Plastics Unlimited Inc. that Nancy, who serves as the company’s vice president, and Terry, now president of the firm, were quick learners. Today they operate out of a custom-built 67,750-ft² facility in an industrial park in Preston with 100 employees. They also have a 10,000-ft² facility for offsite storage. Plastics Unlimited manufactures thermoformed, urethane, composite, and fiberglass products for customers such as John Deere, Caterpillar, and Navistar International.

In 2004, the Kieffers expanded their manufacturing capabilities by purchasing a company in Moline, Ill. This business is Fabri-Glass Composites, specializing in composite molding, molding fiberglass insulation, and water-jet cutting. Fabri-Glass Composites has 15 employees, and is located in a 32,000-ft2 facility. In 2006, Plastics Unlimited and Fabri-Glass Composites Inc. became ISO 9001 certified, setting the tone for a future making quality products in a safe working environment. “We have several employees who have been with us in excess of 10 years, and we’ve all learned together,” said Nancy.

The secret of their rapid success? “We’ve never been afraid to try something new,” she responded. An example is their part entry in this year’s SPE Thermoforming Division parts competition, a tool-less engineered composite (TEC) for a hood-and-cowl component for Gehl. The hood and cowl were produced using a proprietary, patent-pending process to form the fiberglass-reinforced substrate to the back of a class A-finish thermoformed plastic shell that also features molded-in color. The process combines thermoplastic and composite technologies. Additionally, the process uses up to 35% soy-based resin, which makes for an environmentally friendly product. TEC eliminates VOCs (volatile organic compounds) in all phases of production.

That’s where the Kieffers’ farming comes back into the picture. Today, the couple farms 200 acres of soybeans. Their intent is to grow the beans for use in soy-based resin systems in their patent-pending molding process. Future plans, now in the R&D stage and including another patent-pending process, call for Plastics Unlimited to begin promoting a proprietary corn-based extruded plastic sheet for a variety of applications. “There is huge interest in the biobased plastics business, and the fact that we are farmers as well as thermoformers makes it a doubly important issue [for us],” Nancy said. “We want to pursue this because we see the need for it. That’s very important to us.”