Jerome H. Heckman
Keller and Heckman
Inducted 1986
Jerome Heckman (1928 – 2013) was a senior and founding partner of the Keller and Heckman law firm in Washington, D.C. He devoted his professional life to representing the plastics industry and the Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI, now PLASTICS). He graduated from Georgetown University, receiving his B.S. in 1948 and his J.D. in 1953. Heckman served as lead general counsel to SPI for many years.
As counselor and advisor to all early Chief Executive Officers of SPI, Heckman has been instrumental in shaping and implementing SPI’s mission to promote and foster the plastics industry in the U.S. He worked long and hard to open new markets and to keep existing markets open in the face of efforts to ban tax, or otherwise unfairly restrict the sales of plastics products.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Heckman worked with Bill Cruse, then president of SPI, to prevent bans of plastic garment bags because of the misuse of polyethylene dry cleaning bags as crib or playpen covers. SPI overcame an extremely hostile media environment, and Heckman quarterbacked a legislative effort, including drafting model legislation requiring warning labels to educate consumers, which successfully prevented the threatened bans. As a result, the plastic dry cleaner bag is now the standard product, and many more uses of polyethylene film may have otherwise been sidelined. More importantly, the industry’s responsible action, including warning labels on bags where called for, has educated the public well enough so that reports of accidental suffocations attributable to plastic bag misuse are virtually non-existent.
In the mid-1960s, Heckman worked closely with the plastic pipe industry to break a major barrier to marketing by successfully presenting the case for ABS and PVC drain, waste, and vent pipe to the Southern Building Code Congress. In the 1970s, he worked actively in fending off the wide variety of attacks on the plastics industry during this tumultuous regulatory decade. Working with Ralph Harding, Heckman was able to have a proposed New York City plastic container tax law overturned in 1972. He also prepared the filing that resulted in the FDA’s favorable environmental impact statement, which cleared the way for plastic carbonated beverage and liquor bottles.
Finally, with Ralph Harding, and since then, with G. R. Munger and Chuck O’Connell, Heckman has helped the industry save the market for acrylonitrile copolymers and polyvinyl chloride polymers for all uses, including food packaging, by dealing effectively and transparently with OSHA, EPA, and the FDA.
Although Jerome Heckman never invented a plastic product or application, he has certainly been as creative as any inventor in building and maintaining a business environment that has permitted the tremendous growth of the plastics industry.
Areas of Expertise:
Plastics management, Plastics materials