Plastics industry brittle failures and class-action lawsuits

Cited as the recurring industrial pattern: each material industry waits for its own catastrophic failure before adopting fracture mechanics. Billion-dollar class actions referenced.

The plastics industry has had it several times because plastics can be very brittle or very tough. They put in some plastics that were not so tough and they had some major failures — billion-dollar class-action lawsuits to replace some of these things. Every industry just waits for its own failure to start correcting things. That's sort of the way it is.

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