CHICAGO — Plastech Corp., a diversified custom injection molder, will close its Albuquerque plant after losing an $18 million customer that elected to do its own molding.
The facility, which opened 10 years ago, employs 90.
Mark McCourtney, Plastech's vice president of marketing and sales, said the company will make efforts to place some of the workers at other Plastech plants, including an 85,000-square-foot building to be constructed in Amery, Wis.
McCourtney said the decision by Eureka Vacuum Cleaners Co. of Bloomington, Ill., to take molding in-house, plus the growing concentration of molders in the El Paso, Texas, and Ju rez, Mexico, border region, dictated Plastech's retrenchment.
Albuquerque has ``been a great facility for us,'' McCourtney said in an interview at the National Design Engineering Show, held March 10-13 in Chicago.
The company, headquartered in Forest Lake, Minn., operates other plants in Amery and Rush City, Minn.
The new facility will be built across the street from the 12,000-square-foot Amery operation, with construction scheduled to begin May 1.
Initially, about 20 injection molding presses with clamping forces of less than 200 tons will be relocated to Amery from both the Albuquerque and Rush City operations.
Plastech has sales of $65 million a year, McCourtney said.
The firm also operates Allied Plastics Co. in Plymouth, Minn., and Miller Manufacturing, with plants in Dassel and South St. Paul, Minn.