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Just One Word: Plastics : Industry: Akron, Ohio, the nation’s former tire capital, is restyling itself as a center of synthetic materials research and development.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

They smile patiently around here at the plastics jokes and the inevitable references to the 1960s movie “The Graduate,” in which career-bound Dustin Hoffman was counseled that the future lay in plastics, that dog-eared symbol of everything artificial.

The young man in the movie didn’t take the advice, but Akron did. Known as Rubber City before industrial decline knocked it for a loop, this community just down the road from the revitalized Cleveland is trying to reinvent itself as Polymer Heights.

So far, so good. It’s not a perfect recovery--the new jobs often don’t pay as much as the old ones, for example--but the unemployment rate here last month was 4.9%, nearly two points below the national average.

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That figure might rise, because Akron’s rubber-based legacy continues to deliver body blows. The latest was the announcement in June that Japanese tire maker Bridgestone was moving its Firestone unit’s headquarters and at least 200 jobs out of a landmark office building here to Nashville, Tenn.

It was a worrisome aftershock to the earthquakes of the 1980s, when they quit building tires for good in Akron and foreign monoliths bought all the local tire companies except Goodyear. The tire industry’s surviving white-collar ranks in the Akron area have been slashed again in the current automotive downturn, and many fear that the 1,100 people still employed by Firestone here eventually will be moved.

While the three-county region of 780,000 people has gained population in the past several years, Akron itself has shrunk and its downtown is struggling. Tire industry employment has dwindled to 10,000 jobs from 70,000 in the 1940s.

The rubber heritage lives on in a different molecular form.

The development of the polymer industry here demonstrates how one Rust Belt city can energize its economy by building on an established scientific and manufacturing base. Akron has speeded the process by sponsoring polymer research specifically to develop commercial enterprises.

A decade after Firestone built its last truck tire in Akron, University of Akron President William V. Muse said, employment in the area is at a record high. Some 30,000 of the jobs are related to polymers, of which synthetic rubber is one.

“I wouldn’t know a polymer if I met one walking down the street,” said Muse, whose downtown school of 30,000 students is intimately tied to the polymer industry. “But I certainly recognize its potential for this area.”

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Despite the disclaimer, Muse--and practically everyone else here--speaks knowledgeably of polymers. The subject is even taught in kindergarten.

Norbert Bikales, director of the National Science Foundation’s polymers program, said: “I was at a reception at the university, and who should show up but the mayor of Akron (Donald Plusquellic). He started talking to me about polymers.”

Creatures of the materials explosion of recent decades, today’s polymers follow on the development of synthetic rubber during World War II. That crash government program was based in Akron because it had been the Rubber City since Benjamin Franklin Goodrich set up shop here in 1870. They started teaching “rubber chemistry” at the University of Akron in 1910.

Polymers are materials with naturally occurring molecules--especially in petroleum--that can be intertwined to create substances with strength, durability and other handy qualities.

Scientists are now able to rearrange molecules on computer screens to “create” new polymeric materials or blend polymers with other materials, such as metals, and to predict how such hypothetical materials would behave.

This leads to the production of unheard-of compounds or alloys in the form of hard plastic, flexible rubber, liquid coatings, adhesives, fibers, lubricants and other materials, such as the slippery, synthetic “paper” they use for the brochures from the University of Akron’s College of Polymer Science and Polymer Engineering.

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Today’s cars have dozens of components--from body panels to engine parts--made of plastic composites that are light, resilient and quiet. Aerospace, medical, construction and other industries like the stuff, too.

In other words, hold the jokes about polyester suits. Polymer, whose production nationwide is now said to exceed steel, copper and aluminum combined, is treated with reverence here.

The clearest evidence of this is the university’s gleaming, $17-million Polymer Science Building, opened in April to house what the school calls the best polymer program anywhere.

“Most colleges have medicine or law as their flagship. At Akron, it’s polymer engineering,” said C. E. Galloway, chairman of the Edison Polymer Innovation Corp.

In part, Akron’s new identity is a booster’s device for refurbishing the area’s image. Rather than marking some infusion of new industry, it reflects the rubber industry’s evolution into more exotic materials. Many of today’s polymer jobs could as easily be called rubber jobs.

Nor is Akron the polymer leader it would like to be. According to the Center for Regional Economic Issues at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, the Akron area ranks seventh among 41 U.S. communities in polymer-based economic activity--behind Detroit and Houston.

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Polymers are proportionately more important to Akron, and represent the fastest-growing manufacturing industry, aided by a research explosion here and elsewhere that, since 1977, has quintupled the number of polymer faculty members in the nation to more than 1,000. Thus polymers are seen as offering a chance for the local economy to diversify its scientific and manufacturing base.

Take the “Akro.” That’s the brand name of a would-be replacement for the environmentally noxious aerosol can. Developed by a new firm, Akron Polymer Container Corp., the Akro is expected to go into production this year in an old B.F. Goodrich tire plant, under contract with a firm that sells saline solution.

Robert Winer, president, describes the Akro as a self-pressurizing container that relies on a rubber bladder rather than chemicals to expel the contents. Some 300 firms are testing the Akro, and it has received tentative patent approval, he says.

Winer’s fledgling company was launched in part with a $240,000 grant from Galloway’s EPIC, a business-government-academia partnership which gave the firm access to a University of Akron lab and several researchers.

“I needed polymer expertise, I needed rubber expertise, and I needed machine shops that could do specialty molds,” Winer said. “Everything was here.”

It remains to be seen whether the community can bring in enough small firms with significant numbers of jobs. The Akron area now claims some 300 polymer firms, and officials say polymers were an important reason for a net employment gain of 31,000 since 1985.

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EPIC, based at the University of Akron and Case Western Reserve, is one of eight regional research centers set up by the state of Ohio’s Thomas Edison Foundation. The Edison program is a business-government venture established in 1984 to help rebuild Ohio’s industrial economy.

In Akron, the idea is to sponsor polymer research with strong commercial possibilities. But commercial ventures to date are few--the Akro and a couple of other undertakings, Galloway said. Ultimately, the community is betting on people such as Neal Neuburger, a young scientist at the University of Akron who is using computers as a bridge to the manufacturing community. He is systems manager at EPIC’s molecular modeling center, where new polymers are developed from scratch.

The new substances Neuburger creates on computer screens can be transformed into actual products--a brake drum, a vacuum cleaner handle--by laser-sensing devices that process the computer’s information without further human involvement.

“You eliminate a machinist,” Neuburger said, a reminder of the bad news about productivity, “and you can have it on your boss’s desk in six hours instead of two weeks.”

The Popular Polymer Polymers are materials with naturally occurring molecules especially in petroleum that are combined to make substances with uncommon qualities of strength, durability and flexibility. Light weight polymers, for example can be used to replace heavier, less flexible metals and other materials. Products that include polymers include: Skis Car and airplane parts Pant hose Polyester clothing Paint Liquid adhesives Surgical thread Carpeting

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