Lewiston company’s plastic pellets are being molded into everyday products throughout New England.
LEWISTON – An observer at Compounding Solutions would see molten liquid plastic being extruded like long strands of spaghetti. General Manager Scott Neal sees medical suction devices, flashlights, hockey masks, yo-yos and a growing future.
Neal is part-owner of Compounding Solutions and a plastics expert. His almost 4-year-old plant on the Goddard Road produces ice-cream-sprinkle-size pieces of plastic by the millions, offering buyers the raw material for their plastic products with the desired properties in the desired color.
More than 100 companies located throughout the Northeast and New England buy the plastic pellets from Compounding Solutions, which can then be melted and molded into almost anything.
It all begins when a company requests a specific colored plastic that has specific properties; each new order from a buyer is custom made.
“Plastic is a very generic term because there are so many different types,” Neal said.
Does the product need to be tough, like a hockey mask? Or flexible, like the sole of a shoe? Suitable to use with food? Able to withstand heat without melting or cold without shattering?
“There is a lot of design and research work initially to discover what the customer really needs for the final product,” said Neal.
A life in plastics
Neal knows. He’s been in the plastics industry since he was 8 years old. His first experience came when his father, Robert Neal, opened Maine Poly Inc. in Greene, which made the plastic for plastic bags, among other things.
After graduating from the University of New Hampshire with a double degree in business administration and economics, it was Neal’s turn to tackle the industry. He and his brothers-in-law, Paul Landry and Scott McFarren, decided to open Polycolors Inc. in 1990. Like Compounding Solutions, the business made plastic pellets, but they were the foundation, or concentrate, for specialty products. Customers would buy the pellets from Polycolors and mix them with their own additives to create the type of plastic needed for their products.
They didn’t need to look far for customers. “We started Polycolors with the idea that we could sell to Maine Poly, a viable company that was already close and would give us a jump start,” Neal said.
Seven years later, in 1997, after Polycolors Inc. had expanded, Neal decided to sell the business to Clariant, a global corporation also located in Lewiston.
But he didn’t stay away from the plastics industry for long.
Two years later, Neal and his father decided to open Compounding Solutions.
A niche in plastics
The new plant allowed the Neals to fully customize each order.
Once the qualities and color of the final product are set, the project moves to the lab at Compounding Solutions. Pigments, fillers and additives are combined to achieve the desired characteristics. The mixture is then tested in the lab using such instruments as a spectrophotometer, which digitally measures color, and a pendulum impact tester, which measures the amount of force needed to break the material.
The second stage occurs in the upper-level of the factory. The colors and additives are blended with virgin plastic pellets, flowing through a funnel to the lower-level. Under heat and pressure, the ingredients become a molten plastic liquid that flows out of the machine like long strands of spaghetti.
These strands are then cut into tiny pieces, packaged in cardboard boxes and shipped off. Production can run minutes, hours or days, depending on the order. Three machines enable the company to make about 25 to 30 different types of pellets each week.
Currently, more than 70 percent of Compounding Solutions’ business is in the medical industry – a figure Neal would like to increase in the future. He declined to offer current sales figures, but over the next five years he said he hopes to triple sales volume, expand production capabilities and double the factory size.
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