Peninsula hopes to make splash at composites trade show in Paris

Published 12:01 am Sunday, March 25, 2012

Representatives of two North Olympic Peninsula companies and the Port of Port Angeles will showcase opportunities on the Peninsula at a global trade show for composite industries in Paris this week.

They join other Washington state companies in marketing the state as the “Silicon Valley” of the worldwide composites industry at the JEC Composites Show, the state Department of Commerce said in a statement.

The Peninsula delegation will highlight the concept of the Olympic Composites Corridor at the show, which has scheduled some 1,200 exhibitors and is expected to draw 30,000 visitors Tuesday through Thursday, said Holly Hairell, port spokeswoman, in a statement.

“It is the largest composite trade show and conference globally,” said Colleen McAleer, the port’s marketing director, as she prepared to leave Friday.

“We will try to meet people and market the assets we have here,” McAleer said.

McAleer said that also attending would be Mike Rauch of Angeles Composite Technologies Inc. — or ACTI — of Port Angeles and a representative of the Sequim Marine Sciences Lab of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, also known as Battelle.

Other companies represented in the delegation are Profile Composites of Bremerton, ElectroImpact of Mukilteo, General Plastics of Tacoma, Globe Machine Manufacturing Co. of Tacoma, Innovative Composite Engineering of White Salmon, Warm Industrial Nonwovens of Lynnwood and Pro CNC of Bellingham.

McAleer will market the port’s composites manufacturing campus at the port’s Airport Industrial Park at the William R. Fairchild International Airport in Port Angeles as part of a broader plan to establish an Olympics Composites Corridor on the Olympic Peninsula.

The port’s composites manufacturing campus has one completed 25,000-square-foot building leased to ACTI, a second building under construction and a third building pad site available.

The Olympic Composites Corridor is an area that includes Bremerton, Kitsap County, Clallam County “and to some degree Jefferson County,” McAleer said.

“We have unique assets here that they don’t have elsewhere,” she said.

Those assets include a deep-water port, a developing composites campus and the marine science lab — which can test composite coatings in a marine environment, McAleer said.

The Olympic Composites Corridor is a public-private partnership focused on bringing composite companies to the Peninsula.

Other partners in the Olympic Composites Corridor include Westport Shipyards, Platypus Marine, Peninsula College — which provides training for the composites industry — the Port of Bremerton, Olympic College, Kitsap Aerospace & Defense Alliance, the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences, Mervin Manufacturing, the Clallam County Economic Development Council and the Kitsap Economic Development Authority.

The representatives to the Paris show are sharing a $7,000 booth funded half by the state Department of Commerce, McAleer said.

The port has paid $1,500, and the cities of Port Angeles and Sequim each contributed $1,000, she said.

In recent years, the composites industry has been growing rapidly, and two major companies in ­Clallam County — ACTI and Westport shipyard — each have expanded as more composites are used in aircraft parts.

Commerce selected the Olympic Peninsula to showcase its partnerships and assets in the composites field, Hairell said.

JEC is the largest composites industry organization in Europe and the world with a network of 250,000 professionals from 96 different countries, the company says on its website at www.jeccomposites.com.