scientific research, engineering, testing, and design work aimed at the creation of industrial facilities, installations, and technologies and to provide scientific documentation for the work of these facilities and installations. In the chemical industry there were about forty such institutes, working in contact with institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) and institutions of higher education.

In the USSR, the profile of each industrial institute was determined on the basis of the product principle and was connected with the development of materials closely related by the technological characteristics of their production (e.g., polymerization plastics, polycondensation resins, polyurethanes, polyepoxies, phenolformaldehyde resins, polyacrylates and polyvinyl chloride, and plastics reprocessing). All of these institutes, which were the only ones in the country carrying out their particular type of work, were assigned lead functions and responsibility for the development and application of these materials. For example, the lead institute for polymerization plastics (now the Plastpolimer Joint Stock Company Institute) was and is responsible for the development and implementation of technologies for producing four types of polymerization plastics: fluoropolymers, polyolefins, polystyrenes, and polyvinylacetate plastics. For the 52 years of its existence, the institute developed and implemented technologies for a broad assortment of fluoropolymers for the domestic market, including for the aerospace, aviation, and defense industries. The institute has helped to ensure that domestic demand for fluoropolymers in the Soviet Union and now Russia has been fully met, making the exportation of such polymers a possibility.

The institute has developed several notable technologies. For example, the institute developed a technology for producing thin layers of polyethylene in a tubular reactor. Five production units have been built on the basis of this innovation. It also developed a technology for producing high-impact polystyrene and another for producing acrylonitrile/butadiene/styrene (ABS) plastics by mass polymerization, both of which have been put into production at several plants.

The institute has made substantial improvements in production processes created on the basis of technologies purchased from foreign firms. For example, the institute worked out a domestic technology for the dimerization of ethylene in butene and created two production units for obtaining butene as a comonomer in the production of linear polyethylene by the gas-phase method using equipment purchased from the Union Carbide company. For its development work, the institute used a test facility featuring an entire arsenal of experimental equipment. It has used the equipment in such processes as the polymerization of olefins. (including under high pressure), fluoromonomers, styrene, and vinylacetate and in the creation of polymer composites.

The plastics institute has always worked closely with RAS institutes, including the Institute of High-Molecular Compounds, the Institute of Chemical Physics, the Institute of Petrochemical Synthesis, and the Siberian Branch Institute of Catalysis, and with higher education institutions, including St.