Jack Avery, principal of Salt Lake City, Utah-based Avery Plastics Consulting (www.averyconsultants.com), worked at GE Plastics for 34 years before retiring in October 2004. In that time, he worked in a variety of areas, including research and development, quality control, manufacturing, marketing and technology.
Today, in addition to doing business and marketing consulting for plastics industry companies, he also is an associate vice president of ISIS International Inc. (www.isisusa.com), a Monroe, Conn.-based company that aims to help clients increase profitability via product innovation and technology commercialization.
Avery has been active in conversion process technology, including structural foam, blow molding, extrusion, multiprocess technology, gas-assist injection molding and Thixomolding. For three years, he was a global technical leader working with Toyota and Mitsubishi to develop new applications for their vehicles using GE materials. In his last position with GEP, he was responsible for new-technology assessment and delivery.
Beginning in 1986, Avery oversaw a multimillion-dollar, two-year project that involved transforming a 100,000-square-foot assembly and test facility in Pittsfield, Mass., into GE Plastics' Polymer Processing Development Center. In 2004, this facility had 21 pieces of all types of primary plastic processing equipment, plus an optical-media development center. The PPDC is GE's global center of excellence for processing engineering thermoplastics materials.
Avery, who has been very active with various industry trade associations, wrote a book called “Injection Molding Alternatives, A Guide for Designers and Product Engineers,” published in 1998 by Hanser, and he edited another called “Gas-Assist Injection Molding, Principals and Practice,” published May 2001 by Hanser.
He earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Bloomsburg College in Bloomsburg, Pa., and a Master's degree in organic chemistry at John Carroll University in Cleveland.