polymerguru

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share What Is Going Wrong in UK Plastics Recycling? Biffa shut its Sunderland plant. Viridor walked away from Avonmouth and Rochester. Yes Recycling Fife collapsed within a year. All three were backed by major investments All three had buyers lined up for recyclate All three are now offline This is not bad luck It is bad structure Over the next four posts I will break down: 1. Why cheap virgin imports are undercutting UK recyclers 2. How weak policy enforcement is fuelling market failure 3. What volatile PRNs and cheap exports are doing to infrastructure 4. Why demand from brands is softer than their promises Let’s start with the first: **Cheap Virgin Resin = Broken Economics** Virgin PE, PP, and PET have been flooding the global market. New capacity in Asia and the US has driven prices down 30 to 40 percent. Meanwhile, recycled plastic costs more to produce in the UK than it can sell for. We are asking UK recyclers to compete with materials made in places with – ...

Inspired by biology, researchers have achieved the highest performing underwater adhesive hydrogel technology to date through a data mining and machine learning approach. Hydrogels are a permeable soft material consisting of polymer networks and water with applications ranging from bio-medical engineering to contact lenses. Intrinsic to hydrogels is the ability to endow diverse characteristics by modifying their polymer networks. Professor Gong’s research lab at WPI-ICReDD, Hokkaido University, specializes in hydrogel technology and has engineered hydrogels with self-strengthening, self-healing, underwater adhesion properties and more. For adhesive hydrogels, achieving instant, strong, and repeatable underwater adhesion is a prevailing challenge. Through a combination of data mining and machine learning, Professor Gong, Professor Takigawa, Professor Fan, graduate student Liao, and colleagues have recently developed the strongest underwater-adhesive hydrogels to date with adhesive stren...

DataLase has launched its ‘Masterbatch Additive’ – a functional additive designed for integration into plastic products and packaging, for laser coding and marking purposes. DataLase, the global leader in Photonic Printing Solutions, has developed a functional masterbatch additive suitable for a wide range of plastics, including home and personal care, pharmaceutical, medical, electronic, automotive, agricultural and industrial extruded products. By addressing the challenges faced by production and manufacturing companies with product coding applications, such as printing expiry dates and lot numbers, DataLase Masterbatch Additive has been optimised specifically for extrusion and injection plastic moulding to provide unsurpassed product stability and excellent quality. Launched as a DataLase VAReLase® Pigment Solutions initiative, the additive is integrated directly into the masterbatch in pellet form, to provide consistent high quality, high contrast, permanent black coding. When comp...

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share Balsam-Pear-Skin-Like-Structure Polyvinylidene Fluoride/Ethylene–Vinyl Alcohol Fibrous Membrane for Highly Efficient Oil/Water Separation Through One-Step Electrospinning Rapid growth of industrial activities has significantly increased oil demand, leading to wastewater contamination with oil and causing severe environmental pollution. Traditional oil–water separation techniques, such as gravity separation, filtration, and chemical treatments, are hindered by low efficiency, high energy consumption, and secondary pollution. Membrane separation technology has emerged as a promising solution due to its simplicity, low energy consumption, and high efficiency. In this study, we report the fabrication of a novel polyvinylidene fluoride/ethylene–vinyl alcohol (#PVDF/#EVOH) #nanofibrousmembrane (NFM) with a unique balsam-pear-skin-like structure using a one-step #electrospinningprocess . The membrane’s superhydrophobicity and superoleophilicity were achieved via w...

Arkema  announces the creation of the Castor Farmer Education Fund (CFEF), a collaborative initiative designed to support castor farming communities in India.  The CFEF aims to raise funds to further accelerate the adoption of innovative and resilient farming techniques across the region by empowering farmers through education and training, generating lasting environmental and social impact. Integrating castor-based feedstocks into low-carbon materials Castor is the renewable feedstock used in the production of Rilsan® PA11 and  Oleris ® advanced Oleochemicals.   The fund will support projects that improve livelihoods, encourage regenerative agriculture, and foster long-term environmental stewardship in castor-growing regions. Open to all stakeholders, customers, brands, and partners across the castor value chain, the fund offers a unique opportunity to take meaningful, collective action. Together, contributors will help scale up farmer education ...

DuPont (NYSE: DD) today announced 100 percent of its grid electricity is from renewable sources across its entire European Union (EU) operations, through the use of Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs). This milestone underscores the company's commitment to achieving its renewable energy goal and acting on climate stewardship as part of its  2030 Sustainability Goals , as well as marking a key step towards DuPont’s commitment of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. “At DuPont, we are guided by a core value of protecting the planet, aligning our sustainability goals to meet the expectations of our customers, value chain partners and the communities in which we operate,” said Alexa Dembek, Chief Technology & Sustainability Officer at DuPont. “Converting our European Union manufacturing sites to 100 percent renewable electricity is a significant step in our journey to further reduce our emissions, lower the carbon footprint of our products and put us on a clear path toward decarboni...

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share 𝗥𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘀 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀. 𝗦𝗹𝗼𝘄𝗹𝘆, 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲𝗹𝘆. I keep noticing that radiation is often underestimated as a risk factor for plastics – until mechanical properties start to change and no one can quite explain why. The process itself is well understood – but it’s not visible. Depending on the environment, part geometry and radiation dose, polymer structures begin to degrade or cross-link. This can lead to embrittlement, loss of elasticity or even gas release. With oxygen present, oxidative degradation is the most common outcome. Without oxygen, degradation and cross-linking compete – and which one dominates depends on the details. These changes don’t happen overnight. They happen gradually. And that’s exactly what makes them so dangerous – because they often go unnoticed until the damage is done. Anyone using plastics in radiation-exposed environments needs to be aware of these mechanisms. Material selection alone is...