SECTIONS

• About Leo Baekeland & Bakelite

• How the industry has changed

Towns built around plastics

• Consumer attitudes

• Plastics as a replacement material

• Time line

• National Plastics Center

• The next 100 years

• Plastics in pop culture

• Photo gallery

• Viewpoint

• Perspective

A video interview with Palmer Humphrey

China tough competition for Comb City molders
 
Leominster, Mass., isn't called Comb City much anymore, after most of the work was lost to China. But three comb molders are upholding the tradition.

Plastics industry big in small Kansas town
 
In a white, nondescript, concrete-block building on the west end of town, Keith Swinehart started extruding vinyl shapes for the aluminum window and storm door industry in 1958. His fledgling operation, Consolidated Plastics, was the first plastics manufacturing firm in McPherson, Kan., a town that has improbably become a manufacturing mecca of sorts, particularly in plastics.

Berry, GE top employers in Evansville area
 
Evansville, Ind., is home to the University of Evansville Purple Aces and a full house of plastics companies. In the four-county area around Evansville, in southern Indiana, one out of every five manufacturing jobs is plastics-based — a total of almost 6,000 jobs.

Pearl River boasts 2.5M plastics workers
 
The region between Hong Kong and Guangzhou known as the Pearl River Delta rose to prominence in the late 1970s as the first Chinese region to open up to Western economic development. Today, the zone has more than 2.5 million plastics-related jobs and more than 15,000 companies.

Town's shoe industry gives way to processors
 
Twenty years ago, nearly 1,200 shoe manufacturing companies had factories in León, Mexico. Half that number exist today. However, survivors rely heavily on the city's blow and injection molders to develop their range of models -- good news for the plastics industry.