Plastic is an unavoidable modern material: in food and product packaging, furniture, laptops, cellphones, car parts, kitchen utensils, appliances, electrical wire, toothbrushes, clothing and so much more. It’s impossible to go through a day without encountering the material in one way or another.
Some people call plastics an environmental villain — virtually impossible to dispose of, made from fossil fuels and, in microscopic form, a hazard to human health. But for the marine industry, plastics make boating better. They seal out sea- and rainwater, guard gunwales against pilings and piers, trim out interior components, and serve as base materials for hundreds, if not thousands, of parts and pieces.
For 133-year-old Barbour Corp., plastics and polymers are a lifeblood. The extrusion manufacturer goes through nearly 10 million pounds of pelletized and recycled thermoplastics every year. A sizable portion of Barbour’s products end up on boats and as aftermarket marine goods.
“The company actually started out in 1892 as a manufacturer of leather welting, which trims the sole from the upper parts of shoes,” says president Michael Casey, who has been with Barbour for more than 25 years, as we tour the company’s 127,000-square-foot Brockton, Mass., thermoplastics extruding facility. “We’re still a major manufacturer of leather shoe welting today and import tens of thousands of pounds of leather every year to make those products. We also manufacture vinyl shoe welting that is almost indistinguishable from leather, using extrusion processes like the ones we use for marine and other products.”
In 1971, vinyl welting kickstarted plastic extrusion processing at a new company called Barbour Plastics Inc. By 1983, the manufacturer was producing flexible and rigid vinyl rubrails and interior trim components for the marine industry. Boatbuilders that Barbour serves today include Formula, Boston Whaler, Sea Ray, Scout, Grady-White, Viking, Tracker Marine Group, Key West and Monterey, among others.
Barbour each year produces thousands of miles of plastic extrusions at the Brockton location and in its 60,000-square-foot factory in Atlanta, which opened in 2006. Products are also bound for industrial applications in warehouses, grocery stores, appliance production, manufacturing facilities and household-products companies such as Rubbermaid.
Walking the factory floor in Brockton, I noticed a melted plastic smell to the air, but the facility is not smoky or hazy, and it’s surprisingly quiet at times. Automobile-sized boxes of plastic pellets are stacked to the ceilings. They line one side of the facility adjacent to the many extrusion machines that they feed.
Manufacturing plastic extrusions is a bit like making pasta, or squeezing out shapes from a Play-Doh machine, but on a much larger scale. The process starts as thermoplastic pellets, all sourced from U.S. companies. Those pellets are vacuum-fed into an overhead hopper. It feeds into a heated screw that melts the pellets into a 350- to 400-degree goo. The screw forces the melted plastic into a metal die with an extrusion shape machined into it.
“That screw forces the plastic under hundreds of pounds of pressure toward the die,” Casey says. “Next, we run it through a bath of cool water to set the plastic, which then runs down to a mechanical puller and eventually to an automated cutter.”
Engineering and creation of those extrusion dies is done entirely in-house, a process that lets the company quickly and efficiently create new products for its boatbuilder and aftermarket clients. The machines can run for days, limited only by the material being fed into them. The factory runs two shifts a day, four days a week, and demand often calls for overtime.
“Sometimes we can’t just shut down an extruder because it’s the end of the shift,” Casey says. “It makes more sense to finish the run, even if we have to pay some overtime. And sometimes we work an extra day. Things are busy right now, so that’s happening with some regularity.”
As we move from extruder to extruder, Casey stops at a machine that is being fired up as two technicians loom over it. I look over one of the tech’s shoulders. The plastic being expelled looks like a grotesque, mushroom-like blob.
“It takes a while for the machine to get heated up and the plastic to extrude correctly,” Casey says. “Once we get the shape we want, we’ll guide it down the water bath toward a puller. Getting everything in sync and moving smoothly takes time, but once we’ve got it right, we can run the shape virtually indefinitely.”
Some of the waste plastic from the run-up procedure can be ground up and used again. “We also have recyclers who will purchase it,” he says. “We have very little waste in our operation. It’s not only the right thing to do environmentally, but it also makes the operation very cost-efficient.”
Barbour manufactures flexible and rigid extrusions at both of its plants. Some extrusions are simple shapes, made of only one material, while others are made of multiple colors and materials. Some have metal inserts, like vinyl rubrails with stainless steel running through them. Others have materials that add a metallic shimmer and are more difficult to manufacture. There are also varieties of extruded gasketing using a cross-linked rubberized thermoplastic material.
Samples of every Barbour product are kept in a side room, organized on shelves and racks. Casey says there are thousands of them. He shows me bumpers that protect grocery-store display cases, trim for frozen-food cases, Little League trophy tubes covered in sparkly mylar and dozens of marine products extruded from plastic. Other shelves and drawers have plastic color chips like a paint color sample rack.
“Color quality and consistency are critical,” he says. “Imagine if a boatbuilder buys multiple pieces of a product and the color in one lot is different than another — and goes on the same boat. That’s very bad. Everything goes through quality control and scanning to make sure it’s perfect. If it’s not, it gets rejected.”
Brittany Depina, who has been with Barbour for two years, is quality manager at the Brockton facility. She works in a room with computers and scanners that measure color consistency between batches. I also see her on the floor several times throughout the day examining samples. She shows me one with a bright orange “rejected” sticker on it. “It’s rough and not as smooth as it should be,” she tells me. “We look at color, shape, texture, consistency. This machine helps examine color correctness.”
Additional quality-control processes include subjecting products to ultraviolet light that ages them as if they are sitting under intense sunlight for years.
“Anything destined for outside installation has to go through that testing to ensure it will last,” Casey says. “That’s obviously important for marine products. That stuff has to last for decades.”
Adjacent to the extrusion machines is a large shipping area where custom crates are made to transport long extrusions and other odd-shaped materials, as well as smaller products that go out in cardboard boxes.
“We have to get some lengthy products to customers without shipping damage, so that’s a really important job,” Casey says. “Some of our most experienced and thoughtful employees started in shipping.”
The company employs more than 100 people between its Atlanta and Brockton facilities, and a sizable number of them have been with the company for decades.
“It’s all about the people,” Casey says. “When I started here, there was a bit of old-timer attitude. You know, guys sitting around reading papers while others around them were picking up the slack. That didn’t last long, and today we have a great team at both locations. Everyone is willing to pitch in to get things done, whether it means fixing a complex machine problem or helping someone ship product.”
One employee who is working his way up is Dalton Banard. Today, he works as a CNC machinist in the tooling department where extrusion dies are made. He’s been with the company for five years. “I always wanted to do this kind of work,” Banard says. “I worked hard, and that’s what I love about this company — I did the work and was rewarded.”
Banard started out in shipping, Casey says, “and I could see something in him. He’s a remarkable guy. I told him that if he wanted to, and showed the right attitude and presented himself well, that he could move up. I knew he was interested in the toolmaking and machining department, so he pushed hard, got the training, and today he’s highly valued.”
Another employee, Mark Gladysz, is a senior extrusion specialist who came to Barbour from its acquisition of Keller Products. He has 30 years of experience in plastics manufacturing. Many of his colleagues have 20 years or more with the company.
And while employee satisfaction is important, Casey says taking care of customers is perhaps the company’s highest priority. He visits many accounts every year around the country.
“My dad was in sales, and when I would go on calls with him, he would always tell me how important keeping the customer happy is to success,” Casey says. “We do whatever we can, within reason, to keep folks happy. That might mean a rush shipment, replacing something that isn’t quite right, you name it. Our customers are building things that are made on timelines — they can’t have a small piece of trim holding up a $2 million boat. I love my customers. It’s the best part of my job.”
And those customers keep coming back, Casey says, even amid economic headwinds. “Despite the uncertainty with the economy, we’re very, very busy,” he says, “which is just the way we like it.”
