Tough as Nails to Pronounce, but New Plastics Could Be Big

When Mr. McGuire whispered “plastics” into Benjamin Braddock’s ear in “The Graduate” to tip the Dustin Hoffman character to the choice career path of the future, the line was funny in context. But it also was prophetic.

Some might snicker at the suggestion that plastics have at least as much future as, say, silicon chips (although what do you think most personal computer keyboards are made of, not to mention the packages in which silicon chips are embedded?). But not after talking to Joseph Lichtenhan and Joseph Schwab.

The former Air Force Research Laboratory scientists recently started a company in Fountain Valley, Hybrid Plastics, to further develop a new class of plastic materials called POSS (the pronounceable version of polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxanes). And POSS, they say, are the next leap in plastics technology--hybrid materials that combine organic carbon-based and inorganic silicon-based materials for more strength and heat resistance and less weight and flammability than “normal” plastics and polymers.

This month the company received a $2.1-million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology to further its work on POSS.

It seems that the big problem right now is that the stuff costs so much to make--as much as $500 a pound. As a result, it’s too expensive to use in many applications.

The grant from the national institute’s Advanced Technology Program fund “offers us the financial means to carry out research programs designed to lower the cost of our materials,” Lichtenhan said.

The goal is to devise a means of using ordinary sand (it’s almost all silica, after all) as one of the basic POSS feedstocks, he said. That would make sand the equivalent of crude oil, not in price but in usefulness. Petrochemicals derived from crude oil now are the basic feedstock of the plastics industry.

Lichtenhan said the UC Irvine Accelerate Technology and Small Business Development Center was instrumental in helping Hybrid obtain the grant.

Hybrid now operates with just three employees, including the two founders, but Lichtenhan said the company is hiring and plans to have up to eight scientists and technicians by the end of the year.

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John O’Dell covers major Orange County corporations and manufacturing for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-5831 and at john.odell@latimes.com.