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Byline: Liz Bothwell Last week, I attended the 'Driving Innovation to Advance Plastics Circularity' webinar. The discussion covered practical solutions to address gaps in the plastics value chain, and how [...]

Sharing of innovative information with customers and competitors, which caused the exceptional international competitiveness of the West German plastics industry including chemical firms, plastics fabricators and machine makers are presented. It was found that no accident of different institutions did primarily encourage knowledge exchange between firms in geographical and cultural proximity.

Byline: Waste360 Staff In Germany, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institutes for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques FHR in Wachtberg, Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB and Intelligent Analysis [...]

Chemicals giant DuPont intends to gradually become a life sciences corporation, exemplified by one of its newest innovations addressing waste, a biodegradable PET plastic made from corn sugar at DuPont Australia. It will focus on plant-based rather than petrochemicals-based production, and thus has recently acquired full control of the world's largest seed company.

Even as demand for automobiles rises only moderately, automakers are pumping suppliers of engineering plastics for more sophisticated technology. Driven by customer satisfaction and federal requirements, automakers are putting the [...]

Engineering plastics offer Help with new designs As more buying companies look for in-house design assistance through the use of employee teams, suppliers are finding it advantageous to offer assistance [...]

Many attendees at the Association for Manufacturing Excellence conference in Boston, MA, participated in plant tours that focused on just-in-time (JIT) programs. Those touring BOSE Corp learned about the company's JIT II program. Nypro, a maker of injection-molded products, appears to have created JIT III. The company is attempting to develop unique supplier relationships with a relatively few customer companies., Educational conferences can be an excellent process for continuous comparison benchmarking. And when the Association for Manufacturing Excellence recently held its 10th annual conference in Boston, many attendees took time [...]

Toshiba Corp developed a heat decompisition process which will turn 2.2 lbs of thermoplastics into a liter of gasoline, kerosene or a mixture of both. Addition of a high-density alkaline solution during the heating process transforms harmful hydrogen chloride into a benign salt thus rendering the method as non-polluting. Toshiba plans to process about 220 milion tons of plastic annually in its pilot plant and eventually commercialize the process by 1994.