Haskon Makes Milk Bottle of Polyethylene Hercules unit starts market development on blow-molded containers
Desalination Plant Nearly Ready at St. Thomas With the near completion of a water intake system, Westinghouse is approaching start-up of its water desalination electric power plant at St. Thomas, U.S.-Virgin Islands. The oil-fired, multistage, flash evaporation plant, to be owned and operated by St. Thomas, will produce 1 million gallons of fresh water and 7500 kw. of power daily using salt water from Little Krum Bay. Similar desalting plants have produced water at 90 cents to $1.25 per thousand gallons.
Reuther, Abel Lend Hand to Chemical Union Two of the nation's most powerful union leaders, Auto Workers president Walter P. Reuther and Steelworkers president I. W. Abel, plan to give some advice to the International Chemical Workers Union at a collective bargaining conference beginning late this month in Washington, D.C. The labor chieftains are slated to contrast the bargaining policies and procedures of their own unions with the current situation in chemical industry negotiations. The four-day meeting was called by the chemical union's president, Walter L. Mitchell, to "devise bold new procedures to guarantee our members the kind of wages and benefits they so richly deserve." He says the industry is entirely capable of paying better wages and benefits and can even become a pattern maker. The conference begins Nov. 29. In Denver the same day, another chemical union, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, begins the first meeting of its newly established national chemical bargaining policy committee. The committee, which consists of the union's eight district directors and one 36
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rank-and-file member from each district, is similar to the union's national oil bargaining policy committee. The oil group sets nationwide wage and benefit goals for local bargaining in the petroleum refining industry. Last spring, the oil group set 5% as the nationwide goal for wage increases. Just before the Oct. 8 strike deadline, the union and most of the nation's major oil companies settled on a 4.5% increase. (In September, the average hourly wage for production workers in the oil industry was $3.29; in the chemical industry, $2.93.) OCAW president A. F. Grospiron says the new chemical policy group is not likely to develop a formal bargaining program at its first meeting. Instead, he asked the committee to "begin development of proper approaches to unified national bargaining." ICWU talks of developing a "centralized approach" to chemical industry bargaining. "Centralized" or "unified" labor negotiations have long been a dream of chemical labor unions, but have never been achieved. One stumbling block has been the jealously guarded autonomy of local unions. Another is that no national union has made any real progress in organizing industry leader Du Pont.
Haskon, Inc., is in the throes of a market development program to deepen penetration of plastics into the $250 to $350 million a year milk container business. Its entry is a blow-molded, high-density polyethylene milk bottle. But Haskon, a New York City-based subsidiary of Hercules Powder, says that because of the higher cost, the switch to all-plastic milk bottles will not be as rapid as the trend from wax-coated to polyethylene-coated paper milk containers. Between 800 and 900 million pounds of high-density polyethylene will be consumed in the U.S. this year. About 300 million pounds of this total will go into all kinds of bottles. At present, milk containers account for about 5% of the total polyethylene bottle market. Other companies involved in the plastic milk bottle market include Shell Chemical, Phillips Petroleum, Owens-Illinois, Union Carbide, and W. R. Grace. To increase the use of plastic milk bottles, Haskon is installing bottlemaking equipment in or adjacent to dairies, thus eliminating packing and shipping and reducing production costs. The company will have its first installation in place in January or February 1966, at Martin Century Farms Division of Lehigh Valley Dairy, in Lansdale, Pa. The equipment will be owned and maintained by Haskon. Because of the high investment in equipment, Haskon says, it must have a guaranteed minimum output. For gallon containers, this minimum is about 6 million units annually; for half-gallons, 9 to 10 million. Consumers must pay a premium for milk in polyethylene bottles—about 3 to 4 cents a gallon more than for milk in paper or glass containers. This premium is even higher for half-gallons since polyethylene content is more than half that for gallon containers. Haskon believes that consumers will be willing to pay the premium for plastic milk bottles because the bottles have definite advantages over paper and glass containers. These include light weight, reduced leakage, and freedom from breakage.
