Philip Evan Kamins

Age: 62

Net Worth: $550 million

Source of Wealth: Plastics, chemicals

Residence: Beverly Hills

Philip Kamins started Kamco Plastics, a small plastics scrap yard, with his wife and brother in Sun Valley in 1963.

Eight years later, he founded PMC Inc., also in Sun Valley. The company is now an international conglomerate with thousands of employees and annual revenues at one time topping $980 million. The company and its many divisions manufacture specialty chemicals, foam, film, packaging, plastics, and plastic molding equipment. It ranks as the 10th biggest private company in L.A. County.

The Chicago-born Kamins started in the plastics business at the age of 16, when he went to work for scrap dealer H. Muehlstein & Co. After studying business at Northwestern University, he moved to Los Angeles in 1957, where he became a salesman for Muehlstein.

Kamins has earned a reputation as a bottom fisher, buying up poor-performing companies in the plastics and chemicals business to add to PMC’s operations.

Earlier this year, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration proposed a $250,000 fine for a PMC chemical concern in Chicago, following an accidental chemical leak that triggered a three-mile-wide acidic haze over the city’s Southeast Side. The fine came several years after PMC was fined a record $1.6 million for illegally dumping toxic waste into city sewers.