DuPont Performance Elastomers, LLC manufactures and supplies general purpose and specialty elastomer products. An elastomer is an elastic polymer, it includes a wide variety of synthetic and natural rubbers used for everything from sealing to adhesives to flexible parts used in aerospace, automotive, chemical, and other industries.

The company was founded in 1996 as a joint venture between two chemical companies; DuPont Company and Dow Chemical Company as DuPont Dow Elastomers, LLC. headquarted in Wilmington, Delaware manufacturing plastics. The employees of DuPont Company's Louisville Works Neoprene plant in Kentucky became employees of the new company in the deal. In 2005, the DuPont Company bought DuPont Dow Elastomers and changed the name to DuPont Performance Elastomers, opertaing the company as a wholly owned subsidiary. In 2008, DuPont Performance Elastomers shut down their Louisville Plant and concentrated Neoprene production at a sister plant in Louisiana.

Neoprene is the generic name of an artificial rubber developed by the DuPont Company in 1930 to 1931.

In 1923, Father Julius Arthur Nieuwland (1878-1936), a professor of organic chemistry at Notre Dame University, had discovered that acetylene gas could be polymerized. Two years later, Father Nieuwland met Elmer K. Bolton (1886-1968) of the DuPont Company at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. Bolton saw the commercial possibilities of Nieuwland’s discovery, and DuPont’s research chemists then began a long series of experiments at the company’s Jackson Laboratory. In the process, they discovered that Father Nieuwland’s process was not practical on a commercial scale. Further experiments let to the production of divinyl acetylene. Chemist, Dr. Arnold M. Collins (1899-1982), a colleague of Bolton's, isolated chlorophene and 2-chloro-1, 3-butadiene in 1930. Following this breakthrough, DuPont began the manufacture of its first artificial rubber, trademarked “DuPrene,” in September 1931. On December 11, 1936, it was renamed “Neoprene,” a term to be used generically.