Silicone Is Used to Make a Huge Array of Products : * Industry: The manufacturing staple shows up in shampoo, cereal, paint and many other lines.

If you think your life is remote from silicone, the substance accused of causing health problems when used in breast implants, think again.

You rub silicone on your body in your shampoo and your towel; you ingest it with your breakfast cereal and your antacid; it surrounds you in the paint on your walls and the shirt on your back. It’s used to print the newspaper in your hands.

Cars, computers and CD players, the missiles that defend America and the plants that treat your sewage would have trouble functioning without silicone. Without silicone, you wouldn’t have peel-off labels. You wouldn’t have Silly Putty.

The protean high-tech material is as ubiquitous as steel or plastic, and about $5 billion of it is sold each year to just about every manufacturing industry.

While breast implants may be the most famous use of silicones, they are one of the least significant in dollar terms: Although Dow Corning is the country’s largest maker of the substances, they make up less than 1% of its business, for example.

The fact that so many manufacturers are dependent on silicones means that Dow Corning’s struggle to handle the potential billion-dollar liability relating to its breast implants could affect a lot more than plastic surgeons.

Lockheed, Northrop, Motorola, General Motors and Johnson & Johnson are among thousands of manufacturers large and small that depend on Dow Corning’s myriad silicone products. Industrial customers of Dow Corning are carefully watching how the company attempts to keep the bulk of its businesses healthy as it deals with the crisis in its medical products division. These customers are hoping that the controversy won’t affect their supplies of specialized products often hard to get elsewhere.

Dennis Wagner, president of K. R. Anderson, a Santa Clara company that distributes Dow Corning silicones to the aerospace and electronics industries, says there is no substitute for the materials in many uses. The resistance of silicones to extreme heat and cold, their water-repellency, non-oxidizing quality and tendency not to react chemically with other substances make them essential to coatings and cables in automobile ignition systems, for example, and to protecting chips in computers and weapons systems.

“It would be a disaster for something like this (breast implant controversy) to destroy a company as good as Dow Corning,” Wagner says.

With $1.8 billion in annual revenue, Dow Corning, a 50-50 joint venture of Dow Chemical and Corning Inc., the glass and fiber optics maker, is more than double the size of its nearest competitor, General Electric, in terms of silicone sales. It has more than a third of the world market.

At Pasadena-based Avery Dennison, purchasing manager John Brunskill says he was surprised by Dow Corning’s troubles: Recently his firm named Dow Corning “supplier of the year” for its responsiveness. Their relationship is an important one: Silicone is the sine qua non of the peel-off labels Avery Dennison makes--it’s the slippery stuff that lets them peel.

Lawrence Reed, Dow Corning’s president and chief operating officer, says his top priority is reassuring customers and employees about the health of the company in the wake of the implant controversy.

Despite the potential costs of handling the implant crisis, Reed says, his company has no plans to cut research and development into silicone products.

Silicone is unusually versatile because it combines the best qualities of metal and organic (petroleum-based) plastics, though it is neither.

Silicones’ resistance to sun and rain makes them useful as sealants in construction. They help keep conditioner and shampoo mixed in combination hair products, and help makeup and antiperspirant glide on smoothly. Silicones are used instead of butter to grease molds in commercial baking. Their anti-foaming qualities make them useful in food processing, sewage treatment and antacids.

With silicone everywhere, should you worry? Biomaterials specialist Nir Kossovsky is concerned about silicones in medical devices, but in other uses, he says, there’s probably no reason to panic, though more studies need to be done. In any case, he says, “People should not inject room-temperature silicone bathroom caulk into their bodies.”