Polyethylene manufacturing and hula hoop market development

First high-value-added plastic. Off-spec polyethylene from a new plant became hula hoops for ~18 months until process control caught up.

Same type of story with a new material in the 1950s. It was called plastic, and it was called polyethylene. One of the big chemical companies built a big plant to make polyethylene, had too much variability in properties, and they were about to close it. Someone came up with a product where they could sell all this off-grade polyethylene. It's called a hula hoop. The hula hoop craze of the 1950s came about because this chemical company needed to get rid of all this polyethylene that was off-spec. They had to make little hoops for a year and a half until they could get their production processes under control to make uniform quality product for other applications. That was the first high-value-added plastic ever made, was polyethylene, and if it weren't for hula hoops it never would have made it to market.

1950s polyethylene overproduction problem solved by the hula hoop fad — fifty million pounds of variable-quality scrap polymer found its first mass market in a toy. Used to set up the substitution sequence (polyethylene's creep limit at ~150°F motivated polybutylene, which motivated PEX).

In the 1950s, one of the big plastics companies tried to build a plant because they could. They decided they were going to be able to produce hundreds of millions of pounds of polyethylene every year. They started producing it, but they didn't really have a market. Their original manufacturing quality was variable. They tried to take it to somebody and say, why don't you use this for plastic pipe. Because it's easy to extrude, you form everything at temperatures you hardly burn yourself in the plant. Well it turns out, all the production trials they were running, they couldn't sell their junk because it had no consistency. They hadn't come down the learning curve of manufacturing to get consistent quality.

Post-WWII chemical companies built polyethylene plants but had no market and variable quality; the hula hoop absorbed ~100 million pounds of off-spec polyethylene and got them down the learning curve.

Did I tell you the story of how polyethylene got started? There was sort of a — I can't remember which chemical company, maybe several chemical companies after World War II — they learned how to make polyethylene and they decided to build some big plants and started producing it. But their quality control wasn't that good, so the properties weren't very uniform. No one wanted to commit to start using polyethylene, plus it's only good to about 200 degrees Fahrenheit; you get very hot and it starts sagging.

Mid-fifties chemical-company gamble on a 50-million-pound polyethylene plant with no application, rescued by the hula hoop craze. The variable-quality reject inventory finds a market and funds the learning curve that eventually delivers refrigerator-liner quality. Illustrates the "if you build it they will come" market-creation dynamic for new materials.

There's another story about bringing plastics to market. Plastics were not a very popular material until after World War II. People knew how to make polyethylene back in the 1930s. I had a student do a doctoral thesis on the growth of the plastics industry. One of the big chemical companies decided they were going to build a polyethylene plant, even though there were no applications at the time for polyethylene. Polyethylene is not a fancy material — it's a plastic you don't want to make chairs out of. You usually make chairs out of polypropylene because it's stronger, more rigid, higher modulus. But polyethylene people could make, and they decided to build this 50-million-pound-a-year facility, and they hoped that if you build it they will come.