Flawed design leads to disaster for 3M earplugs

3M Corp. is in the news this week for settling a huge lawsuit, and this time it's not about PFAS.

The Maplewood, Minn.-based company on Aug. 28 agreed to pay $6.01 billion to settle hundreds of thousands of claims brought by military veterans who said its earplugs did not protect them from hearing loss.

The U.S. military used the CAEv2 earplugs — short for Combat Arms version 2 — in training and combat from 2003-2015, including in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I went down a rabbit hole on this story the past few days, looking for details for Plastics News readers. The short version is that this isn't a failure of plastic materials. The problem was that the design just didn't work, and it wasn't properly tested.

The earplugs were first designed and sold by Aearo Technologies Inc., an Indianapolis-based company that 3M bought for $1.2 billion in 2007. The innovative CAEv2 earplugs, and the lucrative contract to sell them to the Pentagon, were key parts of that deal.

The CAEv2 isn't a simple foam cylinder like you see on factory floors. It's a reversible plug, with one side designed to let in low-level noises, such as officer commands, while blocking louder noises. The plug design featured a small internal filter and flexible flanges that adapt to the shape of the ear to seal out noise.

But the story started to unravel when a rival, Moldex-Metric Inc., decided to enter the market in 2011 with a competing product called BattlePlugs. What followed was the usual patent infringement lawsuits, as the two companies jockeyed for advantage.

But what was unexpected was that in 2014, in the discovery process for those suits, Moldex found an internal Aearo report from 2000 that revealed that one end of the two-sided CAE earplugs was too short and that the geometry of some users' ear canal openings sometimes prevented deep enough insertion of the plugs.

Moldex brought a whistleblower suit against 3M, which was settled for $9.1 million in 2018. Moldex's share was $1.9 million.

Aearo then filed for bankruptcy in 2022, but that did not stop the lawsuits. The settlement announced this week covers about 260,000 lawsuits brought by current and former U.S. military service members. Observers are calling it one of the largest tort cases in U.S. history.

This is the second big set of lawsuits that 3M has settled this year. In June, the company agreed to pay up to $12.5 billion to settle suits about cleaning up PFAS in drinking water.

The modern plastics industry only dates back to 1907, so that must be a typo, right? Wrong!

This year marks the 175th anniversary for Farrel Pomini, the Ansonia, Conn.-based company that was founded in 1848 as a foundry and equipment manufacturer by Almon Farrel and his son, Franklin.

The company owes a lot to the rubber industry. In 1916, Farrel engineer Fernley H. Banbury developed the Banbury Mixer, which revolutionized rubber processing.

The big breakthrough in plastics came in 1963, when the company introduced the Farrel Continuous Mixer. By separating the mixing and extrusion of polymers, the machine provided a high-quality polymer at a lower cost than competing technologies.

To celebrate the company's 175th birthday, plus 60 years of the Continuous Mixer, Farrel Pomini is planning an employee and retiree event at the company headquarters in Ansonia on Sept. 28.

I got a message this week from Gefran Inc. in North Andover, Mass., that reminded me that Manufacturing Day is coming up quickly. If you haven't started planning already, there's still time!

Gefran, a manufacturer of sensors, power and process controls, and other industrial components, will host its first Manufacturing Day event for students in October at its Massachusetts plant.

Working in partnership with the Eastern New England Section of the Society of Plastics Engineers (ENESPE) and the Society of Plastics Engineers student club associated with the University of Massachusetts Lowell's Plastics Engineering department, Gefran will host undergraduate and graduate students for a tour on Oct. 6. They will learn about operations, lean manufacturing and technical sales, and talk about careers and technology.

"We are thrilled to collaborate on Gefran's Manufacturing Day to advance manufacturing technology and innovation for plastics engineers," said Davide Masato, ENESPE technical programming chair. "Our commitment lies in continuously inspiring the next generation of young engineers and problem-solvers."

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