Kurt W. Swogger of Freeport, Texas, will be honored April 9 by the world’s largest scientific society for his innovative leadership, including the development of a customer-specific approach to making plastics that comprise food wrapping, automobile body parts, clothing and other products. He will receive the 2002 Earle B. Barnes Award for Leadership in Chemical Research Management from the American Chemical Society at its national meeting in Orlando, Fla.
“We wanted to change the rules of how to produce polyolefins,” said Swogger, referring to the common plastic. “It used to be we’d pick a catalyst and make a process and then market the product. Now we make the process do what the customer wants.”
Dow Chemical Co., of which Swogger is vice president of its research and development division for polyolefins and elastomers, calls the concept molecular architecture. Tailor-making a plastic to match customers’ needs may cost them more up front than simply working with an existing product, he said, but customers make it up with increased efficiency.
Apparently the argument works: From zero in 1994, when Dow implemented the approach, to more than a billion pounds in 2000, molecular architecture — registered as Insite Technology — now represents about 5 percent of the company’s total output of polyolefins worldwide.
“For example, we have a customer in Brazil who uses our bags because he can stuff more chickens in them than he can anybody else’s bag,” he said. “We’ve been able to engineer just a little bit of stretchiness that makes the difference.”
For a chemical engineer turned executive, “the cool part,” as Swogger described it, hasn’t been just spearheading the design and commercialization of an industry innovation, but that every day is exciting, he said. “One day I'm working with the basic chemists, another I'm meeting with customers, the next with the market guys and the next with our lawyers about intellectual property,” he explained.
But Swogger, who graduated from Case Western Reserve University in 1972, said he was first a farm boy who liked to tinker: “My father was a chief petty officer in the Navy and worked with engines so, as you can imagine, I was his chief tool holder.” That, combined with a chemistry set he enjoyed, made chemical engineering a natural choice, he said.
The ACS Earle B. Barnes Award for Leadership in Chemical Research Management is sponsored by Dow Chemical Co.