You dry the last yogurt container and drop it into the blue box. It's
Sunday night, and you're trying to get the week's chores done before
you go to bed. You know you won't have time to do them Monday morning
before you go to work.
Next you sort out plastic bags, and toss a hard plastic cleaning bottle
into the box. Finally, you have the week's empty containers assembled.
You slip on your shoes, grab your keys and walk the box out to the curb.
You feel good because you have been able to divert many plastics from the
landfill. "It seems that everything is made out of plastic these days," you
think to yourself. Even the blue box at the curb is molded out of a synthetic
chemical.
"We manufacture a lot of items here," says Judy Grimson, a plastics engineer.
"We even make blue boxes for recycling." Grimson specializes in injection
molding, which is a method of turning liquid plastic into a mold.
Her company manufactures plastic in two ways: custom orders and proprietary
orders. "In custom work, another company comes in with a design for a part,
and we simply make it for them," says Grimson. Once it's created, the
other company takes the part and sells it.
In the proprietary side of business, Grimson's company actually owns
the design and sells the product. "The blue box is proprietary," she says.
"We own the design and the mold."
It may not have occurred to you that a blue box was researched and designed,
but once you start to look around, you won't believe how many things
are made out of plastic.
"I've been involved in making all kinds of products -- interior automotive
components like door handles, vents, map pockets," Grimson says, listing almost
every plastic part found in a car.
Whether designing recycling containers or car parts, Grimson enjoys her
work. "I get to use my engineering background to do all this work, which is
exciting," she says. And her job is even more enjoyable because women are
readily accepted in these types of technical roles. "It might not be the same
if I was machining metals," she says with a laugh.
Grimson also enjoys working in plastics because it's a relatively
young field. "It wasn't big until 60 years ago, even though plastics
have been around for a long time," she says.
In fact, plastics have been around for a lot longer than most people think.
"They go way back to the 1800s," says Janette Piastuch of the Society of Plastics
Engineers. "Think of polyester -- it goes way back before the days of the
Second World War."
"Even though they go back quite a while, there are new plastics being made
every day," says Larry Dawson. His company uses extrusion molding to make
parts. "It works like a Play-Doh machine that squeezes out resin into different
shapes."
The resin is squeezed into rods or a flat slab. After the slab has hardened,
workers at the company machine it into individual items. They shave, drill
and tap the material to create a unique item such as surgical or electrical
equipment.
Dawson's company manufactures semiconductor parts for computer manufacturing
companies. "These parts come in contact with high temperatures and corrosive
chemicals. This plastic has to be resistant to all that," says Dawson.
Engineers who work in the research department are constantly trying to
find or create the perfect plastic for each part. "When somebody gives us
application parameters, then the engineer chooses the right plastic for the
job," says Dawson.
Diffusion bonding, a new way of piecing together plastic parts, was invented
at Dawson's company. "Before, you couldn't have features cut away
inside a solid block of plastic," he explains. However, a piece of plastic
that has diffusion bonding can have internal features.
"Picture two flat pieces of acrylic. You mill some tracks. That is, you
remove material to create channels in the first piece." Channels are milled
out of the second piece, so that it is a mirror image to the first. "Then
you put them together like a sandwich and fuse them into a solid block."
Now liquids can flow through the channels, or valves can be hooked up to
the different channels. "This is a big help for items in the medical industry
that need valves, and need to have liquids added and removed," says Dawson.
Creating new processes and materials is common in the plastics industry.
And that's why Dawson enjoys it so much. "There's always a newer,
lighter, stronger plastic replacing another. It's exciting to be a part
of the changes in the industry."