The Machines Behind The Plastics | Charlton entrepreneur charts the progress of the polymer industry
In almost every industry with a presence in Central Massachusetts, there are long-time employees and managers and experts who can enumerate the changes that have shaped those industries over the last few decades.
Lewis Iadorola, president of Plastic Solutions in Charlton, is one of those people.
Iadorola started Plastic Solutions about 18 years ago after working for a couple of plastics firms in the United States and Canada. Today, the company sells all the capital equipment used by plastics manufacturers, mostly extruders and injection molding machines.
Pressure Cooker
Throughout New England, those machines are put to work in the packaging, electronics, medical and automotive indus-tries, and as those manufacturers have become leaner, they’ve had more use for Plastic Solutions and companies like it.
And while the increase in business is good, Iadorola said it comes along with an increase in pressure.
“They’re relying on people like myself to handle a lot of the engineering for them, and we have to make them successful at what they’re trying to accomplish, or they’re not going to come back to us,” he said.
Iadorola was around for the plastics industry’s boom period when a wide range of products that were traditionally made with metal were replaced by polymers.
“A lot of processers really benefitted from that conversion, and they could apply (those new plastic components) in areas they never thought of before,” Iadorola said.
Since then, the industry has seen a relatively steady pace of specialization in niche products as commodity product manufacturing has moved overseas. But very recently, there’s been a bit of a backlash, Iadorola said.
Plastics manufacturers that shipped operations to Asia are now finding that simply doing so wasn’t enough to ensure success. “They’ve found that they really needed to have someone stateside to ensure quality and service,” an important consideration some failed to make.
Smart companies have forged relationships with companies overseas while retaining responsibility for proper tooling and service.
Many are finding that it was perhaps a rush to judgment to fly for Asia without thinking about how that might affect customers here when it came to service and support.
The future of the industry here in Massachusetts does not appear to Iadorola to lend itself to offshore manufacturing. “Medical products have to be monitored a lot closer, and that seems to be staying here,” he said.
But that doesn’t mean there’s a plastics hiring boom in the offing.
“There was a time when you could hire a whole fleet of people just to assemble things,” Iadorola said. “Over the last 10 years, it’s become much more automated, a lot of robotics.” And even if that isn’t a boon for Massachusetts’ employment situation, “that’s a high-growth area for us,” Iadorola said.
It’s also going to put added pressure on small manufacturers. Back in the day, plastics was considered more of an art than a science, Iadorola opined. A manufacturer could overcome the limitations of less capable equipment with shear expertise.
Now, companies like that are falling by the wayside as larger or more cutting edge manufacturers invest in technology and energy efficiency.
All of that, while beneficial in the long run, “requires a capital outlay, and the small companies can’t do it, so you have a natural attrition with the smaller companies,” Iadorola said.
Got news for our Industrial Strength column? E-mail WBJ Managing Editor Matthew L. Brown at mbrown@wbjournal.com.
Watch as Lew Iadorola of Plastic Solutions Inc. in Charlton discusses how the industry has changed:
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