Making It Happen: PolyOne Corporation & Cleveland Nanocrystals

Aired February 23, 2005

Our discussion of Ohio's "hi-tech bio" continues today in part 3 of THE REGION'S RESUME. ideastream's Janet Babin reports on two companies that have maneuvered themselves into ideal positions in their field.

Finding new synthetic mixes to make products with has been a hi-tech venture for decades, probably even before the phrase "hi-tech" was coined. Using chemical compounds, scientists have created things like nylon to replace cotton, wool, silk, and rayon, as well as neoprene to replace rubber from trees. The process continues today, on a grand scale, at the international PolyOne Corporation in Avon Lake.

On the sprawling Avon Lake campus a few blocks from Lake Erie, more than 100 workers are crisscrossing the company's colossal manufacturing floors, each with a specific job that contributes to the making of tiny PolyVinyl Chloride, PVC, pellets or cubes. According to PolyOne's website, it's the largest polymer services company in the world.

During a tour of one of the factories, tech manager Jim Vick explains how a compound mixed on the 4th floor of the building eventually becomes a cubed material used to make pipe fittings, appliance parts or, like today's product line, vertical blinds:

Jim Vick: Bricks go up that conveyer to mill rolls... taking brick and melting to very thin strips... and gets diced by the dicer, and those are the cubes you see.

The tiny cubes are then packaged into boxes; Vick says the company ships out as much as a million pounds of material per day.

These polymers and other advanced materials are significant northeast Ohio industries with a long history dating back to at least the 1940s. PolyOne's Dennis Cocco says the region's chemical background is strong:

Dennis Cocco: It was not surprising that the plastics industry grew out of the rubber industry. We were a replacement for rubber in the early years. The equipment to make rubber was what plastics needed, so it's not surprising that a number of chemical companies started here in this region.

The company grew out of B. F. Goodrich, then a new version of the firm merged with the Hanna Company in 2000. Corporate headquarters, research and development, back office systems and some manufacturing take place at the Avon Lake site. Cocco says in addition to PolyOne's physical investment and legacy here, there are other reasons why the international firm likes its Ohio location:

Dennis Cocco: If you were to use Cleveland as a center point, 65 to 75% of our customers are within a 600 mile radius. Our customers are still predominantly in this midsection of the country.

Not only are PolyOne's customers from this part of the country, Cocco says so, too, are a large number of its employees. He says the University of Akron, Ohio State, University of Dayton, Toledo and Kent State have strong materials science education programs that PolyOne routinely taps for top talent.

Many hi-tech products and materials are actually created at the university level, and then picked up by businesses. This so-called technology transfer practice was essential to expanding the number of new hi-tech products in the marketplace. Mark Coticchia is vice president for research and technology management at Case Western Reserve University. Coticchia explains how the practice of tech-transfer began:

Mark Coticchia: It all started in the early 1980s with the Bi-Dole Act. The legislation permitted universities to elect ownership to inventions made with federally funded research, and when that took place, it incentivized to get technology to the marketplace.

Prior to the law, universities would get about 250 patents a year. Now, universities literally receive thousands of patents, and Coticchia says national economic development is the result.

Cleveland Nanocrystals is an example of such development. Case invested $50,000 in the company that is working to commercialize a range of innovative nanomaterials developed at the university.

Case Assistant Chemistry Professor Clemens Burda heads up the company. During a tour of the lab, Burda points out a few students glued to their MAC laptops, and some of the tools of his trade, including a glass box with thick black rubber gloves the length of an arm, sticking outside of the box.

Clemens Burda: We work in here to prevent exposure to air, some decomposing, going bad, essentially. You stick your hand in here, push it through and... it's good to powder your fingers first, it's a tedious process."

Burda's dream is to use nano, or tiny particle, technology to most efficiently use sunlight to create energy.

Clemens Burda: Finding a smarter way to utilize energies is a big topic for me. It seems a logical consequence - inorganic nanos do that better than what we have.

Cleveland Nanocrystals is just one example of university and business partnerships in technology transfer that's taking place across Ohio. But Nortech's Dorothy Baunuch says even more investment is needed to foster emerging technologies here:

Dorothy Baunuch: We need to do better at advocacy both at the state and federal level, to get more research dollars, to get more dollars into our education system for eminent scholars and it's not just the government that has to do this, the people have to understand that this is important.

Tomorrow, how institutions and government leaders are trying to advocate for the hi tech sector, and what needs to be done to spur the seeds of growth happening in Northeast Ohio. In Cleveland, Janet Babin, 90.3.