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June 30, 2008
Clean up those pellets
If someone with a video camera walked around the perimeter of your plant, would they find spilled pellets? That's basically what happened here, in a report on how a group called Surfers Against Sewage documented spilled pellets at a few plants in the UK, and showed how pellets eventually end up as hard-to-clean-up marine debris.
This is embarrassing for the plastics industry. Many companies take this problem seriously and have put systems in place to deal with pellet loss. But a few bad apples can cause big problems for the environment, and they give the whole industry a bad name.
Bottled water report wins award
It's interesting when plastics-related stories win journalism awards, in part because the reports tend to spawn similar stories in other media. So I'll note today one of the winners in the 2008 Gerald Loeb Awards for business journalism.
The first place award for feature writing went to Charles Fishman of Fast Company for his report, "Message in a Bottle." Here's what the news release announcing the winners had to say about the story:
Fishman took on a product that has become ubiquitous in everyday life -- plastic bottles of water -- and showed how wasteful this industry can actually be. At a time when so much attention is placed on protecting the environment, the story presents a thought-provoking argument about how consumers are sacrificing their ideals of a "green" society for the sake of convenience. Fishman's work was wonderfully crafted, combining great storytelling with compelling statistics to prove a powerful point.
For more detail, check out Fishman's report online here.
June 26, 2008
Two views of PS from Houston
The Houston Chronicle has two different takes on polystyrene foodservice products this week, and it's notable how they seem be be coming from such different points of view.
First, a science-related blog on the paper's Web site called SciGuy had an item on Sunday that asked "Better for the planet: Java in a mug or a Styrofoam cup?" It's notable, in this new era of PS product bans, that the report took a pretty balanced view. It noted that "it takes about 14 megajoules (or about 14 million times the energy required to lift an apple 1 meter) to manufacture a ceramic coffee mug. It takes 200,000 joules to make a polystyrene cup, about half the energy required to make a paper cup. So, even before other considerations, you'd have to use the ceramic mug 70 times to offset the energy of a single polystyrene cup."
Adding in the energy of washing the ceramic cup, and it turns out that the mug has to be used 1,006 times to equal PS cups.
"There are other factors, of course," notes SciGuy Eric Berger. "Polystyrene accumulates in landfills, and ceramic mugs much less so. But how many coffee mugs actually get used 1,006 times, or just about every day for three years?"
Yesterday the Chronicle took a different approach to PS, with a Page 1 story on the Houston Independent School District switching away from "environmentally unfriendly lunch trays" at the suggestion of a 10-year-old pupil. It notes that the district plans to spend an extra $160,000 next year in order to buy biodegradable trays, instead of the PS variety it buys now.
The story notes that: "The new trays take about nine months to decompose, compared with the hundreds of years it takes other polystyrene trays to break down, officials said."
In addition to the higher cost, the new trays also mean other changes. For one, kids need to learn to neatly stack used trays back in the boxes they came in, rather than throwing them out in plastic trash bags, so that when they are disposed, moisture and oxygen can get in and make them decompose.
The credit for the change goes to a rising sixth grader in the district.
Austin Fendley, who just finished fifth grade at Lovett Elementary, encouraged HISD to take the leap by publicly scolding them at a May school board meeting for using roughly 40 million foam trays a year.Worried that the old trays were bad for the environment and for students' health, he started packing his own lunch and conducted a science experiment involving alternative products.
He said he's thrilled HISD is switching to a biodegradable trays. "I'm really surprised," he said from summer camp Tuesday. "I didn't know I would actually make a difference."
Perhaps Fendley, or someone like him, is the next generation's SciGuy. What will that mean for the future of the plastics industry?
Beware the high cost of scrap metal
Typically people think plastics companies benefit when metal prices go up. But a custom injection molder in Morenci, Mich., discovered a big potential drawback, when an employee allegedly took $90,000 worth of brand-new molds and sold them for scrap -- for $540.
The story comes from The Daily Telegram in Adrian, Mich., which reports on the mystery of the missing molds at Palm Plastics Ltd. A scrap dealer in Ohio paid about $90 each for 10 molds. The price was based on their weight -- about 50 pounds each.
Unfortunately, they were melted down before police (and the company) could recover them.
The employee who allegedly took the molds claimed he thought they "were going to be thrown out," and "he felt he was doing the company a favor by hauling them away," according to the story.
Sounds more than a little suspicious. I think workers know the difference between a new tool and scrap metal.
Vote for Glenn Beall
Glenn Beall, one of the leading names in the plastics industry for decades, is up for yet another honor. Beall has been nominated for the annual Engineer of the Year award by Design News magazine. And you can help him win.
Voting is open until July 11 on the Design News Web site. The winner will be announced Sept. 23 at National Manufacturing Week trade shows in Rosemont, Ill.
Beall is the sort of guy who needs no introduction, but here's what the magazine has to say about him:
Glenn Beall, whose career has spanned 50 years, is widely viewed as one of the principal engineers who advanced plastics design as a medical device engineer, consultant and teacher. He was an engineer in the research division of Abbott Laboratories from 1958 to 1968 where he developed medical devices, receiving twelve patents. He obtained 23 more patents for medical and other products, while operating his own company, Glenn Beall Engineering, Inc. from 1968 to 1993. In 1993 he formed his present company, Glenn Beall Plastics, Ltd., Libertyville, IL in 1993. Beall received the Award for Outstanding Achievement in Plastics Education from the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE), which cited his work as an instructor on design and other aspects of technology. This work continues. Beall has lectured for Society of Plastics Engineers, the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME), the Association of Rotational Molders (ARM), and other associations, at eight colleges and at seven companies. It is estimated that he has conducted over 650 seminars for more that 28,000 people.
For more background on Beall, check out the nice feature story that Bill Bregar, our senior staff reporter, wrote in 1997 when Beall was inducted into the Plastics Hall of Fame.
June 23, 2008
NY Times on the "Sea of Trash"
The New York Times Magazine had a feature story yesterday on marine debris, focusing on how plastic is reaching remote coasts in Alaska.
It's sad to see so much plastic trash spoiling this wilderness. No one lives in Gore Point, Alaska -- yet, in two weeks, nine volunteers managed to collect 30 tons of debris there, most of it plastic. Who's responsible? What can we do to stop it? The Times asks lot of questions, and does a good job of putting it all into perspective.
For example, it introduces readers to Charles Moore, the oceanographer who deserves much of the credit for publicizing the "Garbage Patch," and then the story points out that his work is "somewhat controversial."
Even marine biologists who share his alarm have misgivings about the sensationalism with which the Garbage Patch is sometimes described. Since the plastic debris in the North Pacific convergence zone is spread out unevenly across millions of miles of ocean, and since most of it is fragmentary, flowing through the water column like dust through air, the Garbage Patch bears little resemblance to a floating junkyard. But it is, numerous scientists assured me, very much for real.Beth Flint’s nuanced testimony was typical. Flint is a wildlife biologist with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. One seabird she studies is the Laysan albatross, which, thanks to a recent Greenpeace ad campaign, has become plastic pollution’s most famous victim — its poster bird, if you will. The ad shows a photograph in which a slimy casserole of bottle caps, cigarette lighters and unidentifiable plastic shards spills from the downy belly of a necropsied Laysan albatross chick. “How to starve to death on a full stomach,” the caption reads. The image is not merely powerful, or shocking; it’s persuasively accusatory. Look, dear consumer, it seems to say; look at what you’ve done, look where what you throw away ends up.
There’s only one problem, Flint says. No one knows for certain whether plastic killed the albatross. Do plastic shards perforate the intestines of chicks? Sometimes. Does plastic obstruct the digestive tract or make a bird “starve to death with a full stomach”? Probably, in some cases. Then again albatrosses eat squid, and chitonous squid beaks are also indigestible. Are the toxins in and on plastics poisoning the birds, as Moore has proposed? It wouldn’t be surprising. According to Flint, long-lived seabirds like albatrosses do indeed have alarmingly high contaminant burdens. But research into the pathology of plastic poisoning is ongoing, and in the meantime, “it’s still all sort of circumstantial.”
Despite these caveats, Flint has little doubt that plastic is “clearly not good” for seabirds, and her praise for Moore is unequivocal. “I think that he’s done a tremendously valuable service to humanity by pursuing this when none of the big oceanographic or academic institutions or government institutions did,” Flint said. She predicts that other researchers will soon “get on his bandwagon.”
Later in the story, author Donovan Hohn looks how to deal with marine debris. Is there a solution?
As nearly everyone I spoke to about marine debris agrees, the best way to get trash out of our waterways is, of course, to keep it from entering them in the first place. But experts disagree about what that will take. The argument, like so many in American politics, pits individual freedom against the common good. “Don’t you tell me I can’t have a plastic bag,” Seba Sheavly, the marine-debris researcher, says, alluding to plastic-bag bans like the one San Francisco enacted last year. “I know how to dispose of it responsibly.” But proponents of bag bans insist that there is no way to use a plastic bag responsibly. Lorena Rios, an environmental chemist at the University of the Pacific, says: “If you go to Subway, and they give you the plastic bag, how long do you use the plastic bag? One minute. And how long will the polymers in that bag last? Hundreds of years.”“The time for voluntary measures has long since passed,” says Steve Fleischli, president of Waterkeeper Alliance, a network of environmental watchdogs ...
The statistics quoted in this story will be considered authoritative, and will be repeated. So you can expect the Times story will raise the heat on the marine debris issue.
June 20, 2008
Liveris and Duffey sound the alarm
National Public Radio has posted a story this afternoon about how the rising price of energy threatens the North American plastics industry.
Host Madeleine Brand interviewed Dow Chemical Co. CEO Andrew Liveris, who pointed out that he has been saying for years that the United States needed to do something or its chemical sector would face a crisis.
Then, host Alex Cohen talked to Tom Duffey, CEO of Germantown, Wis.-based injection molder Plastic Components Inc. (a Plastics News Processor of the Year finalist), who quoted some alarming statistics. He said that many molders have not been able to pass along resin price increases -- and the near-term future for those companies is dire:
"I've talked to a number of people in the industry who have a much broader perspective on the North American marketplace than I do, and it is their expectation that we can see an attrition rate of up to 30 percent of the molders in North America in the next 12 to 15 months. Which will involve hundreds and hundreds of companies, and thousands and thousands of employees in that industry," Duffey said.
"And a lot of these industries are heartland industries. These are Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan manufacturing companies that I think are going to be in severe distress over the next year as these economic forces work at us from two different sides of the equation. One is the decreasing demand for our products just because of the economic slowdown. And the other being the dramatic increase in the price of raw material, which is clearly the biggest cost driver in our industry."
Those are some awfully sobering statistics.
The art and science of making soccer balls
Manufacturers put quite a bit of technological know-how into creating soccer balls. But no matter how perfect the sphere that they create, you can be sure there will be critics. We call these critics "goalkeepers."
Some players at the UEFA Euro 2008 soccer tournament are debating the merits of the ball supplied by Adidas, with material from Bayer MaterialScience AG.
This story, from Germany's Der Spiegel magazine Web site, notes that Czech goalkeeper Petr Cech called the new ball "unpredictable"; German keeper Jens Lehmann complained that it "wobbles," and German goalkeeper trainer Andreas Köpke said "Basically no one is 100 percent satisfied with the ball."
The Spiegel story notes that the ball's designer, Hans-Peter Nürnberg from Adidas, is used to goalkeepers' complaints. The story offers details on the aerodynamics of spinning vs. nonspinning balls, as well as some insight into the equipment wars currently played out between field players and goalkeepers.
Fun stuff, and amazing considering the number of kids around the world who play football in their bare feet, with balls made of old plastic bags tied and taped together.
Speaking of plastic, the "Europass gloria" ball being used at the tournament is plastic, too. It's polyurethane -- not leather -- and its panels are bonded, not sewn together. The surface of the ball has some unusual goose bump-like nubs that Adidas says "improves power transmission, creates greater swerve and increases accuracy on the pitch, in all conceivable weather conditions."
Wait a minute. "Creates greater swerve"? Maybe those crazy goalkeepers have a point!
For more information about the Europass ball, check out the material-related details from Bayer MaterialScience.
And thanks to all involved in the project for finally giving me an opportunity to do a blog item on one of my favorite topics, soccer!
June 19, 2008
Is Houston the best U.S. city?
Kiplinger's Personal Finance recently named Houston, Texas, the No. 1 city in the United States. Frankly, I was surprised.
A lot of folks in the plastics industry live in Houston -- mostly in the resin sector. Plus the Space City hosts a handful of important conferences every year that bring many plastics processors to town. So it's safe to say a lot of the readers of this blog are familar with Houston.
What do you think, readers? Is Houston No. 1?
Here's, in part, what Kiplinger's had to say about Houston:
It's the city of big plans and no rules, beat-the-heat tunnels and loop-the-loop highways, world-class museums and wiry cowboys, humidity that demands an ice-cold martini and the biggest damn liquor store on the planet. How could you not love Houston?
For the record, here's the rest of Kiplinger's Top 10 U.S. cities: Raleigh, N.C.; Omaha, Neb.; Boise, Idaho; Colorado Springs, Colo.; Austin, Texas; Fayetteville, Ark.; Sacramento, Calif.; Des Moines, Iowa; and Provo, Utah.
B&B Molders' training in the news
B&B Molders LLC, a Mishawaka, Ind., injection molder, has stressed employee training for years. Today the emphasis paid off with a nice feature story in the South Bend Tribune.
The story quotes company President Britt Murphey saying that B&B has spent more than $100,000 on training and work force development since 2004, and that 59 percent of his workers have taken classes through the company's "Pay for Knowledge" program.
The program gives workers raises as they take course, plus one-time bonuses of $1,000 for an associate degree, $1,500 for a bachelor's and $2,000 for a master's.
"If they improve their skills, they are more valuable to us," Murphey told the Tribune.
B&B has stressed training all the way from the beginning, when the company was spun off from motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson Inc. in 1996. It's nice to see B&B get some attention -- and this offers yet another good example of the kind of story that many local molders can share with their own local newspapers.
