Silgan Plastics Corp. is closing a plant in Missouri, but the move will not be completed until late next year.
A letter from the company to the Missouri Department of Higher Education and Workforce Development indicates 33 people will lose their jobs in Hazelwood in 2025.
The closure is "due to the consolidation and transfer of customer volumes to other manufacturing locations," the company said in the Dec. 3 letter to comply with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, a federal law that requires advanced notice of layoffs.
"It is anticipated that the closure will be permanent [and] will be carried out in phases with the first phase occurring on Feb, 7, 2025, and the final phase beginning on or about September 2025, and completed in December 2025," the letter states.
"At this time, it is anticipated that all employees at this work site will be terminated. There are no bumping rights for affected employees; that is, employees will not be able to displace more junior employees out of their job positions or transfer to another location because of this closure," the letter states.
Job losses will include 13 machine operators, four material movers, seven packers and five warehouse and shipping employees. There also will be single job losses in each of the following positions: quality control, team leader, human resources business partner and product development engineer.
"This announcement is based on the best information currently available," states the letter from Silgan Plastics, a unit of Silgan Holdings Inc., which also is one of the world's largest maker of metal food cans. Along with plastic food containers, the company also manufactures dispensers and specialty closures, a business segment that includes both plastic and metal products.
Silgan Holdings is No. 8 among North American injection molders, according to Plastics News data with $825 million in sales in the region. It is No. 10 among North American blow molders with $625 million in sales and comes in at No. 23 among thermoformers with $140 million in sales. PN data lists the Hazelwood facility as a blow molding site.
Silgan's decision to close the Hazelwood location comes just weeks after the company finalized purchase of Weener Plastics Holdings BV, a deal that added 19 locations primarily in Europe and the Americas.
At the time of announcing the Weener deal earlier this year, Silgan leadership indicated the company was "far from the end of the journey" to expand the company's dispensing business.