Kickstart: Sustaining excellence

It's been nearly 25 years since Henry Beck held the Plastics News Processor of the Year award in 2000 for the work done by Tessy Plastics Inc. You'd have to go back another 27 years to see the first parts by Tessy roll off the line in Skaneateles, N.Y.

Staying in business for more than 50 years requires constant innovation and investment — in equipment, in technology, in people and in markets. Yet Tessy has managed that.

The company is receiving the PN Sustained Excellence award at the PN Executive Forum in La Jolla, Calif., March 10-12, an award only available to past Processor of the Year winners.

As Editor Don Loepp writes, the company's ability to adapt and excel can be seen in how it has handled market changes since it received the award in 2000. At that point, it was a major supplier to the electronics industry, making parts for printers and cellphones. It had sales of about $100 million and 1,000 employees.

As electronics molding moved to Asia, Tessy built up its business in medical and pharmaceutical. It now has annual sales of about $600 million and employs 1,600.

You can find more on Tessy and this year's three finalists for POY — Intek Plastics LLC, Plastic Molding Manufacturing Co. and Redline Plastics LLC — here.

There's a pretty good chance that the top midsized manufacturer of the year in Wisconsin will be from the plastics industry.

Organizers of the Wisconsin Manufacturer of the Year named their finalists Jan. 9. Four of the six companies in the medium category — those firms with 100-249 employees — are plastics processors.

The finalists are: N.E.W. Plastics Corp. of Luxemburg, a blow molder and extruder; Plas-Tech Engineering Inc. of Lake Geneva, an injection molder and toolmaker specializing in medical components; Radius Packaging of Delavan, an injection molder and blow molder previously known as Schoeneck Containers Inc.; Redline Plastics LLC of Manitowoc, a rotational molder and heavy-gauge thermoformer; and metal machining companies EK Machine Co. Inc. of Fall River and Winsert LLC of Marinette.

You may have noticed Redline mentioned a few paragraphs above this. It is one of three finalists for the 2024 Processor of the Year. It was also a finalist for the 2023 POY as was Radius. (Redline won the PN Excellence Award for Industry and Public Service in 2023 and Radius received the PN Excellence Award for Employee Relations.)

Both Redline and Plas-Tech were finalists for the Wisconsin award in 2024, a year that Menasha Corp. of Neenah, the parent company of reusable packaging company Orbis Corp., won in the mega category for firms with more than 500 employees.

Some big chemical recycling projects are struggling to find a financial foothold.

Our sister paper Sustainable Plastics writes that Carbios, a French biotechnology company, is having to delay its planned PET depolymerization plant for at least six months as it awaits expected funding.

And a Belgian-Dutch joint venture, Advanced Plastic Purification International, has canceled its proposed pyrolysis plant in Ostend, Belgium, because it could not compete against cheap virgin resin imports, SP notes. It had been expected to handle 500,000 metric tons of plastic waste.