Frank Ruiz wears many hats. He is principal owner and president of Plastimin LLC, a certified minority business enterprise in Carrollton, Texas, that develops products and markets for polyolefin and polystyrene mineral reinforcements. Plastimin distributes mineral reinforcement concentrates manufactured by Picayune, Miss.-based Heritage Plastics Inc., for which he also serves as research director. Ruiz helped Heritage Plastics to pioneer the use of mineral reinforcements in commodity polyolefin and polystyrene applications, including film, bags, breathable film, coated paper, blow molded bottles, and thermoformed sheet applications.
Ruiz also serves as technical director for Carrollton-based Heritage Bag Co., a manufacturer of industrial and institutional bags and can liners. He helped that firm develop the use of performance standards for trash bags and can liners, and developed its BioTuf-brand compostable liners used in organic waste diversion from landfills to composting operations.
Ruiz is on the board of directors of the Society of the Plastics Industry Inc's Film and Bag Federation, and also on the board of the California Film Extruders & Converters Association. As chairman of the steering committee of the Sacramento-based California Bag and Film Alliance, he has represented the film and bag industry in its dealings with the California Integrated Waste Management Board. He also is member of several other testing, standards and trade associations.
Ruiz received a bachelor of science degree in chemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in May 1976. He began his career in the polyolefins industry as a film product development engineer at Union Carbide Corp.'s Bound Brook, N.J., technical center in October 1979. While there he coordinated the commercialization of film-grade hexene copolymers for blown and cast film applications, and researched the film properties of blends of conventional LDPE with the then-new LLDPE resins being developed by Union Carbide.
