Paxton, IL, August 3-- Steve Glazik lifts a shiny blue bowling ball and drops it onto the concrete floor of his company's front office. He's not practicing a new bowling move, but proving a point about a new floor mat, according to the News-Gazette.
First he drops the ball onto a mat padded with foam, and you can hear the ball hit the concrete through the mat. Then he drops it onto a mat infused with gel. It also hits the concrete through the mat, but the sound is more muffled.
"It's kind of like Jell-O, but a little harder," said Glazik, chief executive officer of Plastic Designs Inc., of the gel inside the mat. "It's not a liquid. It's solid, so when you stand on it for hours, it pushes back at you. Liquid will eventually spread out."
Impact Gel mats are one type of hundreds of products manufactured at Plastic Designs Inc., a company with 40 employees and a 60,000-square-foot building on the outskirts of Paxton. The firm works with about 50 different companies using 100 different types of plastic. It has made plastic sinks for salons, portions of saddle bags for Harley Davidson and plastic pallets for Mitsubishi. And the company makes a variety of farm tools for its agricultural division, AgSolutions.
Plastic Designs is marketing the mat to mechanics, who can kneel on it, as well as to hairdressers and factory workers who stand for most of their work day.
"When you walk on it or kneel on it, your feet feel better," Glazik said.
The mats, which come in black, white and gray and in different sizes, are scattered about Plastic Designs' offices, where employees and visitors have been testing their effectiveness.
The Impact Gel mats are one of the company's most recent projects, and it's a product Glazik, who is also a corn and soybean farmer, is particularly excited about. The gel contains 65 percent soybean oil.
"All you hear about in manufacturing is the trade deficit, how everything is going offshore. This makes us feel good. The raw products are grown here," he said.
The company had its first production run of 200 mats in July and hopes to produce a few thousand. Those numbers, Glazik admits, will not balance the country's trade deficit or single-handedly prop up the soybean market, but every little bit helps, he said.
