Poly Wants a Plastic (An Interview with Jackie Goudelock)

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In this modern day and age, man-made plastics are emerging in more and more unexpected places. Plastic is one of the most versatile materials that can be manufactured. Plastics can be malleable, brittle, durable, heat resistant, spring-like, and they have many other useful qualities. One company that manufactures a wide variety of plastic films is Berry Plastics. It is impressive how much thought and communication with the clientele occurs in creating plastic films. The clients of Berry Plastics are often very involved in the feedback loop with the engineers working on the products. 

Plastics are in almost everything. There is not really an odd product in plastics because almost anything can be made of plastic or have plastic in it. Product lines are often commonplace and used in everyday life such as plastic bags, the film of a camera, diaper backsheet films, and Tupperware containers. 

The clients of Berry Plastics come with a product in mind or often even a product that they want redesigned. Various constraints, parameters, and regulations must be met depending on the product. As of late, many companies are looking to save face and save money by making their products greener and less wasteful.

A common practice comes when companies aim to down-gauge their plastic film products. This means that the company is trying to reduce the amount of plastic material in the product. This can be done by redesigning the packaging or the product itself to be need less plastic to function properly or hold its form. Another option is to use Post Consumer Recycle (PCR) plastics which allows the company to make environmental claims, perhaps for advertising purposes. Lastly, some request experiment runs to evaluate compostable and degradable materials as well as the new renewable source polymers; however, these types of materials are still very expensive and not generally used at this time, but there is an interest in them among the clients of Berry Plastics.

The design and production of polymers is the process that the films are made by at Berry Plastics. Chemical engineers are the general workforce behind the design and production of those polymers. One such engineer is the subject of my interview, Jacqueline Goudelock. 

Jackie and her husband Joel Goudelock

She works for Berry Plastics as a product development engineer. She attended University of Toledo for her degree in Chemical engineering which she uses to inform her in her work. She also went to The Ohio State University for further advancement in her studies. She comes from a family history of engineers and is married to an engineer. Both her father and grandfather were engineers who worked in plastics. Jackie, as she is colloquially called, says she was influenced by this early exposure to the "biz" in her final career choice.  When in college, she specialized specifically in polymer engineering.

In her work, she works in polymer extrusion and specifically cast and blown plastic films. Polymer extrusion is done to create a large amount of a consistent profile from raw plastic material. Her most common customers deal with personal care and the packaging business. The most common products she works on are diaper backsheet films and the packaging of those diapers. She works with the sales and production personal at her own company. Outside her company, she works with Original Equipment Manufacturers (the people who make the raw materials), Berry Plastics' customers, and occasionally the paper and non-woven industries. 

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She must meet certain regulations for products depending on their use. For example, personal care items generally must be FDA approved for skin contact. Another example is that film products that go into containers for food require FDA approved materials for food contact. Finally, the raw materials used in the films must meet the customer's safety needs.

The most rewarding thing and the most difficult thing in her work is translating a customer's need into a product characteristic. Solving that problem is the most interesting and dynamic part of her job. Customers always have new demands or issues that she and her company have to meet. Often a customer will have a processing issue or an end product improvement in mind and it is a large part of her job to figure out how and what she can build into a new product to resolve the issue or to enhance the product as requested. She does this by designing experiments on Berry Plastics' pilot equipment aiming to meet those requirements. The variety and challenge of the projects she works on keeps it interesting to her.

Mostly, she works from her home office, but she does travel domestically and to plants. She goes to Berry Plastics' plants to, "run trials on the films, host customers, or roll out new products." In her previous positions in her field she had traveled to Brazil, Argentina, and Peru for work but in her current job, she does not travel outside of the United States. "The plastic industry is big in Texas." Many of Berry Plastics' suppliers have manufacturing locations in the Houston area.

The achievement that most stands in her career was when she got her Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. Six Sigma is a program that many companies employ and have workshops on for process improvement. For her project, she, "solved a printing issue that her company had struggled with for years."

The problem was a print stability problem with a registered print film. This means that a graphic was to be printed on the film for the final product. The issue was that the graphic was printed on a film around an area that is very weak and soft. Due to this weakness, the film is often wound and under tension which causes the film to creep under the constant stresses. Due to this problem, one roll would end and when the client switched to the next one and the lengths suddenly are longer and the equipment cannot adjust for it. A quick but wasteful solution was to cut off the top inch or two from each roll for the equipment to be able to run them. She designed the formulation to one with better creep properties and also optimized the wind profile on the printing press to solve the issue.

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The product in question was a diaper that a customer wanted to print an image on. It is amazing how something so seemingly simple can be incredibly complicated and troublesome. Something often taken for granted is just how many things in the world are really the manifestation of some person's idea that has gone through testing and development to become what it is today. Especially in a city, where there is hardly anything truly natural; everything is a design or an idea come to life. Even a park's trees were laid out according to some design or description.

There are still new things to be done, and all things can always be improved. There is no such thing as a perfect design and if there were, people would find some way to break it. In the polymer industry, new ideas are emerging that are useful. "The development in the past few years of elastomeric materials can be used in films." Elastomerics are polymers that behave like rubber; they are malleable and can be deformed easily. These new ways and ideas are emerging everywhere and the world needs people to make them useful. Discoveries are only as useful as the applications they provide. Problems are always waiting to be solved and the world will never be short on them. Engineers are problem solvers at heart. Jacqueline Goudelock is a true problem solver. Someday, I hope to be one as well.