New Modular Polyethylene Tank Stand from Assmann Corporation Offers 100% Chemical Resistance

Assmann Corporation has introduced new modular polyethylene tank stands for use with the FDO (full drain outlet) assembly. These new stands can be installed on any suitable, flat surface and elevate polyethylene tanks 12" from grade for a full drain tank without the need to pour concrete. The stands are 100% chemical resistant and are suitable for all corrosive environments.

Features of this modular tank stand include corrugated sidewalls for maximum support, interlocking dovetail joints for securing modular sections together and optional wind load anchoring points. The lightweight modular sections are easily disassembled and relocated to a different site. A wide range of color choices are also available.

Assmann has tested this stand to over 300,000 lbs. of crush force.

EPRO Awards TEFAL this Year's "Best Recycled Product" for Enjoy Kitchen Tools

EPRO (European Association of Plastics Recycling and Recovery Organisations) has awarded Enjoy Kitchen Tools, manufactured by TEFAL - SAS, France as this year's winner of "Best Recycled Product".

Following the success of the first Best Recycled Product Competition in 2009, earlier this year, EPRO invited the plastics industry across Europe to provide examples of products containing recycled plastics.

The competition aims to promote the cycle of plastics, as well as increase the request for recycled materials. Once again the competition has been a great success, over the two years the competition has lasted, we have seen over 60 entries from 13 countries. The entries were judged by a panel from across Europe, including representatives from EPRO, Plastics Europe and EuPR. The awards were presented at a key plastics industry event - Identiplast 2010, in London.

The top three places were awarded as below:

1. Enjoy Kitchen Tools, TEFAL SAS - France
2. eko84®, Retail Shopping Trolley, Keo S.r.l - Italy
3. FORMaBLOCK, Innovation in low cost construction, FORMaBLOCK - UK

Worth the effort

Hundreds of thousands of tonnes recycled plastics are used as material for new products. Sometimes the material is cheaper and sometimes the recycled material is just superior to an alternative. The competition therefore focused on several criterias: The entries had to contain at least 50 per cent recycled plastics. They also had to be made out of recycled used plastics packaging, entered the market and made sales in since 2008 and of course, it had to be manufactured in Europe.

The results of the this year competition show that global operating and well- known companies such as TEFAL recognize that recycled plastics is a valuable raw material for their products.

"The competition brings home the reality of what can be achieved when we all work together. For the consumer who makes the effort to collect their used packaging for recycling this competition provides some great examples of what can be achieved. For the industry we hope that it creates interests and confidence in the versatility and value of considering used plastics packaging as a material option for products. For all, we hope that more and more, used plastic packaging is seen as a valuable resource and not waste. We thank everyone for supporting the competition and look forward to seeing what's new in 2011" commented Eirik Oland, Head of EPRO Communication.

India: CNG supply to be extended

The Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas, Shri Jitin Prasada, recently assured that Indian government is committed to providing all the support to the utilization of natural gas in transportation and that it has already sanctioned 6,335 km of pipeline, while the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board (PNGRB) is in the process of authorizing another 5,000 km to connect various parts of the country.
The government plans to cover several cities where pipelines and CNG facilities would be rolled out in the coming years. The gaseous fuel is expected to be available in 86 cities in the next three years, 200 in the next five years, while the goal is to reach 330 cities by 2020. “India will see explosive growth in the use of natural gas driven vehicles in the next years. We are going to more than double the existing pipeline network from 11,000 km,” said PNGRB’s chairman Lalit Mansingh.

Regarding the automotive industry, manufactures are optimistic about growth thanks to the growing network of fuelling stations and pipelines. “We have launched five CNG models in limited markets of Delhi, Mumbai and Gujarat. If the volumes of natural gas supplies improve, we would like to reduce the imports of our CNG components and manufacture them here, which would reduce the cost for vehicles,” said Maruti Suzuki’s managing director and CEO, Shinzo Nakanishi, to the local newspaper The Hindu.

During the opening of NGV India 2010, at Bombay Exhibiton Centre, Jitin Prasada also said that CNG-driven two wheelers would soon see the light of day. “This along with CNG driven taxis and three wheelers would create a revolution on our roads to provide affordable, comfortable travel to the middle class, the office workers and factory employees,” he added.

It is worth mentioning that Pune has also committed to clean-burning fuels as its district administration is planning to make it “a pollution-free city,” according to the district supply officer, Pradeep Patil. In turn, Maharashtra Natural Gas Limited (MNGL) will install three more CNG stations in the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) area, while they want to set up 20 facilities by March.

Polysulfone Dental Device Remedies Teeth Grinding Problem

For people who are suffering from a tendency to grind their teeth while asleep, Michigan-based Grind Guard Technologies together with injection molder Maple Valley Plastics, has introduced ‘GrindGuardN’ a safe medical device for the mouth. A 3-mm-high central power bar is positioned at the middle of the mouth guard that directs pressure on the upper and lower teeth, and is said to reduce the biting and clenching intensity by up to 60%.

The transparent injection molded 0.2-mm-thick outer shell of this dental device is made of Udel® P-1700 polysulfone (PSU) resin from Solvay Advanced Polymers, which is insert molded with a polycaprolactone (PCL) thermoplastic. To customize the GrindGuardN according to your mouth, it can be placed in a microwaved water for 90-120 seconds at 130°F (54.44°C). The white colored polycaprolactone turns transparent which signifies that it is soft enough to fit easily in synchronization with the front teeth. Polycaprolactone doesn’t deform or melt even at temperature up to 171°F (77.22°C). GrindGuardN, has received clearance from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.

Researchers Train Bacteria to Convert High Percentage of Bio-wastes into Plastic

TU Delft Researcher Jean-Paul Meijnen has 'trained' bacteria to convert all the main sugars in vegetable, fruit and garden waste efficiently into high-quality environmentally friendly products such as bioplastics. There is considerable interest in bioplastics nowadays. The technical problems associated with turning potato peel into sunglasses, or cane sugar into car bumpers, have already been solved. The current methods, however, are not very efficient: only a small percentage of the sugars can be converted into valuable products. By adapting the eating pattern of bacteria and subsequently training them, Meijnen has succeeded in converting sugars into processable materials, so that no bio-waste is wasted.

Basis for bioplastics

The favored raw materials for such processes are biological wastes left over from food production. Lignocellulose, the complex combination of lignin and cellulose present in the stalks and leaves of plants that gives them their rigidity, is such a material. Hydrolysis of lignocellulose breaks down the long sugar chains that form the backbone of this material, releasing the individual sugar molecules. These sugar molecules can be further processed by bacteria and other micro-organisms to form chemicals that can be used as the basis for bioplastics. The fruit of the plant, such as maize, can be consumed as food, while the unused waste such as lignocellulose forms the raw material for bioplastics.

Cutting the price of the process

"Unfortunately, the production of plastics from bio-wastes is still quite an expensive process, because the waste material is not fully utilized," explains Jean-Paul Meijnen. (It should be noted here that we are talking about agricultural bio-wastes in this context, not the garden waste recycled by households.) The pre-treatment of these bio-wastes leads to the production of various types of sugars such as glucose, xylose and arabinose. These three together make up about eighty per cent of the sugars in bio-waste.

The problem is that the bacteria Meijnen was working with, Pseudomonas putida S12, can only digest glucose but not xylose or arabinose. As a result, a quarter of the eighty per cent remains unused. "A logical way of reducing the cost price of bioplastics is thus to 'teach' the bacteria to digest xylose and arabinose too."

Enzymes

The xylose has to be 'prepared' before Pseudomonas putida S12 can digest it. This is done with the aid of certain enzymes. The bacteria are genetically modified by inserting specific DNA fragments in the cell; this enables them to produce enzymes that assist in the conversion of xylose into a molecule that the bacteria can deal with.

Meijnen achieved this by introducing two genes from another bacterium (E. coli) which code for two enzymes that enable xylose to be converted in a two-stage process into a molecule that P. putida S12 can digest.

Evolution

This method did work, but not very efficiently: only twenty per cent of the xylose present was digested. The modified bacteria were therefore 'trained' to digest more xylose. Meijnen did this by subjecting the bacteria to an evolutionary process, successively selecting the bacteria that showed the best performance.

"After three months of this improvement process, the bacteria could quickly digest all the xylose present in the medium. And surprisingly enough, these trained bacteria could also digest arabinose, and were thus capable of dealing with the three principal sugars in bio-wastes." Meijnen also incorporated other genes, from the bacterium Caulobacter crescentus. This procedure also proved effective and efficient from the start.

Blend

Finally, in a separate project Meijnen succeeded in modifying a strain of Pseudomonas putida S12 that had previously been modified to produce para-hydroxybenzoate (pHB), a member of the class of chemicals known as parabens that are widely used as preservatives in the cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries.

Meijnen tested the ability of these bacteria to produce pHB, a biochemical substance, from xylose and from other sources such as glucose and glycerol. He summarized his results as follows: "This strategy also proved successful, allowing us to make biochemical substances such as pHB from glucose, glycerol and xylose. In fact, the use of mixtures of glucose and xylose, or glycerol and xylose, gives better pHB production than the use of unmixed starting materials. This means that giving the bacteria pretreated bio-wastes as starting material stimulates them to make even more pHB."

Scientists Manipulate Plant Metabolism to Produce Potential Precursor to Raw Material for Plastics

In a pioneering step toward achieving industrial-scale green production, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators at Dow AgroSciences report engineering a plant that produces industrially relevant levels of compounds that could potentially be used to make plastics. The research is reported in Plant Physiology.

"We've engineered a new metabolic pathway in plants for producing a kind of fatty acid that could be used as a source of precursors to chemical building blocks for making plastics such as polyethylene," said Brookhaven Biochemist John Shanklin, who led the research. "The raw materials for most precursors currently come from petroleum or coal-derived synthetic gas. Our new way of providing a feedstock sourced from fatty acids in plant seeds would be renewable and sustainable indefinitely. Additional technology to efficiently convert the plant fatty acids into chemical building blocks is needed, but our research shows that high levels of the appropriate feedstock can be made in plants."

The method builds on Shanklin's longstanding interest in fatty acids - the building blocks for plant oils - and the enzymes that control their production. Discovery of the genes that code for the enzymes responsible for so called "unusual" plant oil production encouraged many researchers to explore ways of expressing these genes and producing certain desired oils in various plants.

"There are plants that naturally produce the desired fatty acids, called 'omega-7 fatty acids,' in their seeds - for example, cat's claw vine and milkweed - but their yields and growth characteristics are not suitable for commercial production," Shanklin said. Initial attempts to express the relevant genes in more suitable plant species resulted in much lower levels of the desired oils than are produced in plants from which the genes were isolated. "This suggests that other metabolic modifications might be necessary to increase the accumulation of the desired plant seed oils," Shanklin said.

"To overcome the problem of poor accumulation, we performed a series of systematic metabolic engineering experiments to optimize the accumulation of omega-7 fatty acids in transgenic plants," Shanklin said. For these proof-of-principle experiments, the scientists worked with Arabidopsis, a common laboratory plant.

Enzymes that make the unusual fatty acids are variants of enzymes called "desaturases," which remove specific hydrogen atoms from fatty acid chains to form carbon-carbon double bonds, thus desaturating the fatty acid. First the researchers identified naturally occurring variant desaturases with desired specificities, but they worked poorly when introduced into Arabidopsis. They next engineered a laboratory-derived variant of a natural plant enzyme that worked faster and with greater specificity than the natural enzymes, which increased the accumulation of the desired fatty acid from less than 2 percent to around 14 percent.

Though an improvement, that level was still insufficient for industrial-scale production. The scientists then assessed a number of additional modifications to the plant's metabolic pathways. For example, they "down-regulated" genes that compete for the introduced enzyme's fatty acid substrate. They also introduced desaturases capable of intercepting substrate that had escaped the first desaturase enzyme as it progressed through the oil-accumulation pathway. In many of these experiments they observed more of the desired product accumulating. Having tested various traits individually, the scientists then combined the most promising traits into a single new plant.

The result was an accumulation of the desired omega-7 fatty acid at levels of about 71 percent in the best-engineered line of Arabidopsis. This was much higher than the omega-7 fatty acid levels in milkweed, and equivalent to those seen in cat's claw vine. Growth and development of the engineered Arabidopsis plants was unaffected by the genetic modifications and accumulation of omega-7 fatty acid.

"This proof-of-principle experiment is a successful demonstration of a general strategy for metabolically engineering the sustainable production of omega-7 fatty acids as an industrial feedstock source from plants," Shanklin said.

This general approach - identifying and expressing natural or synthetic enzymes, quantifying incremental improvements resulting from additional genetic/metabolic modifications, and "stacking" of traits - may also be fruitful for improving production of a wide range of other unusual fatty acids in plant seeds.

This research was funded by the DOE Office Science, and by The Dow Chemical Company and Dow AgroSciences.

LCA by Toyota Tsusho & Braskem Concludes that Green Polyethylene can Reduce GHG Emission

Braskem S.A. and Toyota Tsusho Corporation (Toyota Tsusho) have concluded the joint study of life cycle analysis for polyethylene derived from Brazilian sugarcane (Green Polyethylene), and has found that the Green Polyethylene emits less greenhouse gas (GHG) when compared to petroleum-based polyethylene even if it is delivered to the other side of the earth.

The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan conducted the analysis under the collaborative study with the parties using the preliminary eco-efficiency study performed by Fundação Espaço Eco in Brazil (2007/2008), which shows that 1 kilogram of Green Polyethylene emits 1.35 kilograms* of CO₂ equivalents of GHG when it is produced in Brazil, shipped to Japan, used by consumer as container and packaging, and then incinerated. Meanwhile, traditional petroleum-based polyethylene emits 4.55 to 5.10 kilograms in its overall life cycle. As a result, the study demonstrates that 70 to 74 percent of GHG can be reduced with the substitution of Green Polyethylene for traditional polyethylene.

For details of the study, Professor Masahiko Hirao and Assistant Professor Yasunori Kikuchi of the university will deliver a presentation at "International Congress on Sustainability Science and Engineering - ICOSSE11", the most renowned environmental congress held in Tucson, AZ, USA, on January 11, 2011.

Earlier this year, Braskem inaugurated the largest industrial-scale plant of bio-based ethylene with an annual production capacity of 200,000 tons to be converted into the same volume of Green Polyethylene. Toyota Tsusho will start distribution of Green Polyethylene in Asian countries including Japan after certain shipping time from Brazil to the countries.