polymerguru

Celanese Corporation, a global specialty materials and chemical company, today introduced a series of strategic initiatives designed to enhance capabilities, strengthen competitiveness, simplify manufacturing footprint, and prioritize continuity of supply to customers of its Engineered Materials business.  Celanese is repositioning its nylon business to create a more competitive and resilient platform for the future, without compromising customer confidence, product quality, or the Company’s ability to innovate on its existing polymer production assets or existing specialty polymerization capability.  A critical step in this nylon transition is today’s announced closure of the Sakra, Singapore, unit, as well as the optimization of the North American nylon 6,6 polymerization production facilities in Richmond, VA and Washington, WV, which is expected to reduce overall polymer production. Celanese expects to operate the Sakra facility through the end of July 2026 to ensure a smoo...

Many plastic products are designed to be used only once, yet the material itself lasts for years. But a new strategy is addressing this problem by creating products that self-destruct on command, known as living plastics. These materials incorporate activatable, plastic-degrading microbes alongside the polymers. One team reporting in  #ACS Applied Polymer Materials used two bacterial strains that worked together and completely broke down the material within just six days, without making microplastics. Zhuojun Dai, a corresponding author on the paper, explains that “the realization that traditional plastics persist for centuries, while many applications, like packaging, are short-lived, led us to ask: Many microbes can break long polymeric chains into smaller pieces using enzymes. Because plastics are polymers, these enzymes or the microbes that make them could be incorporated into living plastics. “By embedding these microbes, plastics could effectively ‘come alive’ and self-...