The Future is Plastic
September 15, 2003

By James Klein, Larta VOX Editor

"I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Plastics."
-- Mr. McGuire

In the opening scene of "The Graduate", a friend of the family provides Benjamin Braddock, played by a young Dustin Hoffman, with perhaps the most famous movie line of advice given any young man. Audiences in the sixties sneered at his crass pragmatism, but given everything that has been made of plastic in the last thirty years, perhaps Mr. McGuire was right. Perhaps he still is.

Plastic has been the most pervasive industrial compound of the twentieth century, but one company is finding ways to make plastic even more useful in the twenty-first.

Hybrid Plastics™ has developed an entirely new chemical technology that combines the best qualities of ceramics and hydrocarbon-based plastics. The company began making the materials commercially in 1998, and now has more than 250 customers.

Hybrid Plastics' technology is based on a class of chemicals called Polyhedral Oligomeric Silsesquioxanes or POSS®. $15 million has been spent to develop these POSS® materials, which can be used as an additive or as a replacement for traditional plastics.

Incorporating POSS® into traditional plastics makes them unusually lightweight, durable, heat tolerant and environmentally friendly. In addition, tests have shown that polymers with the POSS® components form a ceramic shell that withstands radiation 10 times longer than other materials.

POSS® molecules require no special equipment or processes to be added to existing manufacturing systems. While solvents are used in their initial manufacture, they emit no volatile organic compounds, and the company hopes to eventually produce the material directly from sand.

The federal government and the R&D chemical market are the company's largest customers today. Hybrid Plastics™ is targeting applications of POSS® technology in electronics, aerospace and packaging, but there are many other companies pursuing applications in other areas. POSS® technology has commercial applications in cosmetics, electronics, medical plastics, dental adhesives, consumer products, and in the construction and transportation markets.

POSS® molecules originally cost as much as $5,000 per pound and took up to three years to produce. Hybrid Plastics has since lowered production costs to as low as $50 per pound, and reduced production time for some materials to as little as one day.

POSS® molecules are chemically modified particles of silica with an average diameter of 1.5 nanometers (about 60 billionths of an inch), and are considered "hybrid" chemicals because they combine inorganic (silicon-based) and organic (carbon-based) components.

Hybrid Plastics™ has won numerous awards, including the 2003 Nano Republic Award for "Most Promising Application", Small Times Magazine's 2002 Best of Small Tech Award, and the Council of Chemical Research Collaboration Success Award for 2001. The company presented at the 2001 Southern California Technology Venture Forum, won a 2001 CalTIP grant, participated in the Larta University programs, and was recognized as one of Larta's "Top 10 Nanotechnology Companies" in 2002.

Hybrid Plastics™ is one of a few companies that has delivered on the promise of nanotechnology, the use of materials measured in nanometers, which are one-billionth of a meter, or roughly 75,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. While many nanotechnology companies focus on reducing particle sizes, Hybrid Plastics' products are based on molecular-level chemistry. The company is one of the few first-wave nanotech companies that is self-sustaining from organically generated sales.

Billions of dollars have been devoted to nanotech R&D, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) predicts nanotechnology will grow into a $1 trillion a year industry. However, Dr. Michael Gamble, Director of Scientific Programs at Fidelys, reports in the Larta white paper "Nanotechnology: What to Expect" that "Nanotechnology seems like it has everything going for it. But, like any new technology, there are challenges: financing, driving markets, and adoption rate."

Hybrid Plastics™ has avoided these problems by partnering extensively with developers and end-users to design POSS® technology that will improve the performance characteristics of existing products. POSS® can be incorporated into nearly all types of thermoplastics and thermosets, rubbers, and oils. Hybrid Plastics™ also conducts bulk-scale manufacturing of POSS® technology and owns or has exclusive license to the patents covering basic POSS® composition and manufacturing processes, and has numerous patents pending.

"Monetizing the knowledge of why and how to effectively use nano as a solution, along with supplying the key nanomaterial ingredients, have become core competencies for our growth," says Joe Lichtenhan, CEO of Hybrid Plastics.

General Electric researchers discovered a version of Hybrid Plastics' POSS® molecules in the 1960s. Current POSS® technology was first developed for aerospace applications at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), where Joseph D. Lichtenhan was working with POSS® molecules. In 1998, Lichtenhan partnered with Joseph Schwab to launch Hybrid Plastics with a $2 million Advanced Technology Program (ATP) grant from National Institute of Standards (NIST).

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