Hilex closes North Carolina plastic bag plant

Hilex Poly Co. LLC, the world’s largest plastic bag company, announced the closure of its Mt Olive, N.C., plant on Thursday, Sept. 11. The plant closure is part of an ongoing asset optimization plan that the company has been implementing since its acquisition of Vanguard Plastics in October of 2005. The company will also lay off around 160 employees, according to Associated Press reports.

Ben Mascarello, vice president of operations for Hilex, said, “While this is an extremely difficult decision, this action supports our overall strategic plan to remain competitive and adjust our capabilities to meet the evolving needs of our customers. Our continued productivity improvements across our manufacturing network will allow for some of the capacity of our North Carolina facility to be absorbed elsewhere, but this is also a deliberate action to reduce market capacity for the production of plastic t-shirt bags. We have seen a significant shift in demand toward our reusable bag products and we expect that product line to maintain a meaningful share of the grocery and retail markets.”

Hilex is continuing its focus to meet customer needs while managing market capacity and continuing to aggressively control costs in a highly competitive market. The company has also gone to great lengths to manage its manufacturing consolidation in a respectful manner. Mascarello added, “At Hilex, our employees are our most important asset. As such, we are making every effort to provide employment opportunities within other Hilex locations for a substantial number of our Mount Olive employees. We are also working with other local manufacturers and the Employment Security Commission of North Carolina in order to assist our employees in finding new employment locally.

We have a large number of operations in the United States and we are dedicated to preserving American manufacturing jobs. Our efforts to strengthen our Company will allow us to continue to do that.”