Jon M. Huntsman
Inducted 1994
Jon Huntsman (1937 – 2018) was an inventor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. Huntsman was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Huntsman group of companies, the largest privately-held producer of petrochemicals in the nation. Born in Blackfoot, Idaho, Huntsman attended the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania on a Zellerbach scholarship. He graduated at the top of his class in 1959. After two years in the U.S. Navy, Huntsman earned an M.B.A. from the University of Southern California. He was subsequently awarded thirteen honorary doctorate degrees at various universities.
Huntsman had a very diverse career in the plastics industry. Working with the Olson Brothers, Inc., an egg-producing company in Los Angeles, he helped develop the first plastic egg carton. In 1967 Huntsman was appointed president of Dow Chemical Company’s Dolco Packaging Division in Southern California, a joint venture with Olson Brothers. He then served under President Nixon as special assistant to the President and White House staff secretary. He later founded Huntsman Container Company, where in 1974, he created the “clamshell” container for the Mcdonald’s Big Mac and developed other popular rigid plastics and foam plastic fast-food containers. In 1980, he sold Huntsman Container to Keys Fiber and took a three-year sabbatical to serve his church.
Re-entering the plastics industry in 1983, he purchased Shell Chemical’s polystyrene plant in Belpre, Ohio, which he expanded and added to through acquisitions in the U.S. and abroad. He established the Huntsman Chemical Corporation, which quickly became a major world participant in styrene monomer and polystyrene production. Additional acquisitions from Shell and Elf Atochem in France in the late 1980s and 1990s, together with a joint-venture purchase of Texaco Chemical Company, expanded Huntsman’s global presence, including a plastics packaging plant in Gorlovka (Horlivka), Ukraine. In 1994 Huntsman Chemical became the Huntsman Corporation, a publicly-traded company 2005. With executive offices in Salt Lake City, Huntsman also has operations at sites in more than a dozen countries, manufacturing billions of pounds of petrochemical products each year and employing over 5,000 people.
Huntsman was a leading philanthropist who contributed millions of dollars to engineering education in the plastics industry and worldwide humanitarian programs for the disabled and the homeless. Huntsman and his wife, Karen, founded the Huntsman Cancer Institute in 1995, now one of America’s major cancer research centers dedicated to finding a cure for cancer with a state-of-the-art cancer specialty hospital. His service to the Mormon Church was also significant. Huntsman served on numerous corporate, civic, and cultural boards. He was vice-chairman United States Chamber of Commerce and chairman of the Utah Symphony Orchestra. He was a member of the Board of Trustees for the University of Pennsylvania and an advisor for the Wharton School.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Huntsman_Sr.
Areas of Expertise:
Plastics processing, Plastics materials, Plastics management