Chemists at DuPont’s Parlin, New Jersey laboratory produced a pyroxylin lacquer in 1920 called Viscolac and improved upon it in the following years and renamed it Duco. In the late 1920s Dulux was developed, which was an alkyd finish and had a higher gloss finish; a matte version of Dulux was also developed. This collection is a packet of advertising and sales aids for dealers of DuPont Duco and Dulux paints and finishes.

John M. Barineau (1950-) worked at the DuPont Company for more than forty-five years, serving in a variety of capacities, including operations, product and process development, quality management, product management, capital project management, process safety management, Six Sigma improvements of supply chains, and purchasing, as well as with customers and suppliers working at or visiting approximately seventy DuPont Company sites and contract operations in sixteen countries. E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company is a chemical company more commonly referred to as the DuPont company. This small collection of Barineau's papers provides insight into product development. The materials are public information associated with operations that have been sold or terminated or are outdated. These documents show a "behind-the-scenes" view of what was happening within DuPont. The collection has been arranged into five series: Engineering Polymers/Nylon Resins files, Engineering Polymers/Hytrel Polyester Elastomer files, Engineering Polymers improvement initiatives files, DuPont corporate improvement initiatives files, and General files.

Polyacryl Iran Corporation (PIC) manufactured polyester and acrylic synthetic textiles in Iran. It was incorporated in August 1974 as a joint venture between E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, one of the largest U.S. chemical firms, and the Behshahr Industrial Development Corporation, a conglomerate run by the influential Lajevardian family. Because of political unrest within the country, DuPont shut the plant down in early 1979 with the hope of resuming operations at a later date. When Iran's textile industry was nationalized under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini following the Islamic Revolution, DuPont initiated legal action for claims against PIC and the Iranian government. An international court reviewed DuPont's claims and directed the Islamic Republic of Iran to reimburse DuPont for $42 million. The American records of the Polyacryl Iran Corporation document DuPont's role in the transfer of American technology to Iran, the fate of Western interests during the Iranian Revolution, and the subsequent expropriation and pursuit of damage claims. Because of the litigation surrounding the termination of DuPont's participation in the project, the records contain extensive plant design and managerial training documents that give a detailed picture of a state-of-the-art synthetic textile factory of the late 1970s.