TESTEX has launched the TESTEX MICROPLASTIC label, setting a new standard for reducing textile microplastic emissions. Using advanced LDIR technology, the label certifies textiles tested for particle emissions per ISO standards. As a member of The Microfibre Consortium, TESTEX collaborates on reducing fibre fragmentation, sharing data to support sustainability goals by 2030.

UK Startup Naturbeads Secures Series A Round to Further Pioneering Technology That Addresses Worldwide Microplastic Pollution  Business Wire

[Opinion column written by OBA candidate Malachi Symonds] We live in a world where, at times, convenience comes with a high cost. Single-use plastics have emerged as a major contributor to both environmental degradation and public health crises. A recent study revealed that plastics were responsible for producing 5.3% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 […]

A Penn State University study published in Environmental Science & Technology: Air reveals that airborne microplastics may influence the climate by affecting cloud structures and weather patterns. The study found that microplastics act as ice nucleating agents in clouds, potentially altering precipitation. Professor Miriam Freedman highlights the need for more research into how these particles interact within atmospheric systems to better understand their effects on climate.

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Duisburg, Germany, and Oslo, Norway - 1st July 2024

Some people in Spain appear to have covered their cars in plastic wrap ahead of another approaching storm.

(EMAILWIRE.COM, October 25, 2024 ) The report "Plastic Compounds Market by Product (PVC, PP, PE, PS, PA, PC, PET, PU, ABS), Source, End-use Industry (Automotive, Packaging, Electrical & Electronics, Building & Construction, Consumer Goods, Medical), and Region - Global Forecast to 2029 " The global...

(EMAILWIRE.COM, November 04, 2024 ) The report "Micro Injection Molded Plastic Market by Material Type (LCP, PEEK, PC, PE, POM, PMMA, PEI, PBT), Application (Medical, Automotive, Optics, Electronics), and Region (North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, MEA, South America) - Global Forecast to 2028"...

[RFI] Africa continues to grapple with plastic pollution, a waste crisis, and limited investment, activists report, as discussions unfold at the UN climate meetings in Azerbaijan. To shed light on these overlapping challenges, RFI interviewed campaigners and negotiators from across the continent.

In 2014, shops started charging a minimum of 5p per bag in attempt to reduce waste.

Plastic pollution hits Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and India hardest, with India leading in production.

Plastic Components announced the death of its longtime president, Tom Stark, on March 6.

Plastic Components now offers individual brochures for its PVC Trims and Accessories product lines, which include stucco/plaster, stone veneer, drywall, Direct Applied Systems, Exterior Insulated Finish Systems and fiber cement board trims.

Inline Plastics has expanded its Safe-T-Fresh® portfolio to include three new 7-inch rounds with a smooth wall. By popular demand, the new products will include 24oz, 32oz, and a four 6oz compartment option, with more items to follow soon.

The Good Plastic Company is turning trash into treasure, giving old plastic a glamorous makeover.

There are many different foreign materials that could and actually have ended up in foods. The most insidious of these and the one most feared is glass.

SolidTech R is engineered with a unique stone recycled core, replacing all PVC with 100% recycled single-use plastic. Each square foot of SolidTech R contains the equivalent of 20 recycled water bottles. Additionally, every purchase of SolidTech R goes toward stopping ocean plastic in collaboration with Plastic Bank.

ABSTRACT Introduction Individuals with schizophrenia present anomalies in the extension and plasticity of the peripersonal space (PPS), the section of space surrounding the body, shaped through motor experiences. A weak multisensory integration in PPS would contribute to an impairment of self-embodiment processing, a core feature of the disorder linked to specific subjective experiences. In this […]

The post Peripersonal Space Plasticity in Relation to Psychopathology and Anomalous Subjective Experiences in Individuals With Early‐Onset and Adult‐Onset Schizophrenia was curated by information for practice.

A tsunami of toxic plastic waste looms on the horizon but a revolution is promised. Quite how serious is the situation and what is being done? To set the scene, two thirds of plastic products are short-term, throw-away items containing over 13,000 chemicals, many of them toxic, products like shopping bags, straws, cups and so on. The history The first manufactured plastic was Parkesine, patented in 1862 by its British inventor, Alexander Parkes. It was made from cotton fibres dissolved in nitric and sulphuric acid, and mixed with vegetable oil. It substituted tortoise and turtle shells and ivory. Over the other side of The Pond, John Wesley Hyatt founded the Celluloid Manufacturing Company (USA) and mass produced items such as combs, sunglasses... and cinema film. By 1907 the first fully synthetic plastic had been invented by the Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland, who combined formaldehyde and phenol to produce Bakelite (the material used in the old telephones). By the early twentieth century, the plastics manufacturing giants had already been formed by the alliances of chemical and petroleum industries – ExxonMobil, Dow Chemicals, DuPont, BASF and the British company, ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries), which by 1932 was producing Perspex.

MltG, a membrane-bound lytic transglycosyl­ase, has roles in terminating glycan polymerization in peptidoglycan and incorporating glycan chains into the cell wall, making it significant in bacterial cell-wall biosynthesis and remodeling. This study provides the first reported MltG structure from Mycobacterium abscessus (maMltG), a superbug that has high antibiotic resistance. Our structural and biochemical analyses revealed that MltG has a flexible peptidoglycan-binding domain and exists as a monomer in solution. Further, the putative active site of maMltG was disclosed using structural analysis and sequence comparison. Overall, this study contributes to our understanding of the transglycosyl­ation reaction of the MltG family, aiding the design of next-generation antibiotics targeting M. abscessus.

Gloria Majiga-Kamoto, an activist from Malawi, is one of six recipients of the 2021 Goldman Environmental Prize. Majiga-Kamoto has been instrumental in implementing Malawi's ban on thin plastics.; Credit: /Goldman Environmental Prize

For Gloria Majiga-Kamoto, her great awakening to plastic pollution started with goats.

She was working for a local environmental NGO in her native Malawi with a program that gave goats to rural farmers. The farmers would use the goat's dung to produce low-cost, high-quality organic fertilizer.

The problem? The thin plastic bags covering the Malawian countryside.

"We have this very common street food, it's called chiwaya, and it's just really potato fried on the side of the road and it's served in these little blue plastics," Majiga-Kamoto says. "So because it's salty, once the goats get a taste of the salt, they just eat the plastic because they can't really tell that it's inedible. And they die because it blocks the ingestion system — there's no way to survive."

The goats were supposed to reproduce for the program, with the goat kids going on to new farmers. But because of plastic deaths the whole goat chain started falling apart.

"It was a lot of expectation from the farmers waiting to benefit. So you had this farmer who had this one goat and then they lost it. And that means that in that chain of farmers, that's obviously affected quite a number of farmers who won't get their turn."

For Majiga-Kamoto, her experience at the NGO with the plastic-eating goats was the moment it all changed. All of a sudden she started noticing how plastics were everywhere in the Malawian environment and food system — affecting people's livelihoods and health.

The fish in Lake Malawi were eating plastic trash. The country's cows were eating plastic. Researchers found that in one Malawi town 40% of the livestock had plastic in their intestines.

"We're choking in plastics," Majiga-Kamoto says, "And so what it means is that in one way or the other, we as humans are consuming these plastics."

Majiga-Kamoto was also seeing how plastics contributed to the growth of disease. Huge piles of plastic trash were blocking off Malawi's many waterways, creating pungent breeding grounds for mosquitoes that carry malaria and for bacteria that cause cholera.

The 30-year-old says she remembers a time when Malawians didn't rely so much on thin, single-use plastic. "I remember back in the day when we'd go to the market and buy things like fish, like dried fish, you'd get it in newspapers."

But thin plastics have taken off in the last decade or so as new manufacturers sprung up in Malawi, selling products like thin plastic bags at cheap prices that made them affordable and accessible even in the most undeveloped parts of the country. A 2019 UNDP funded report found that Malawi produces an estimated 75,000 tonnes of plastic a year, with 80% reportedly single-use plastic. Single-use plastic refers to bags, straws and bottles that can't be recycled, and thin plastic refers to plastic that's under 60 microns in thickness.

The proliferation of this thin plastic waste led to the Malawian government's 2015 decision to ban the production, distribution and importation of single-use thin plastic. But before the ban could go into full effect, Malawi's plastics manufacturing industry filed an injunction at the country's High Court. The ban stalled.

When Majiga-Kamoto and a group of her fellow environmental NGO-workers and activists heard about the injunction they were angry and frustrated. "It sort of caught our interest to say, 'Wait a minute, you mean that there's actually people in our society who think that this is not a problem and that we should actually continue to live this way?'"

Galvanized, Majiga-Kamoto led a group of local environmental activists and NGOs to actually implement the single-use plastics ban, organizing marches on the judiciary where the decision would be decided. She kept her job at her NGO, the Centre for Environmental Policy and Advocacy, and did this work on her own time.

She rejected the plastic industry's argument that the ban would hurt Malawi's economy — and even debated an industry lobbyist on TV.

Finally in 2019, after multiple injunctions filed by the plastics industry, the High Court ruled in favor of the single-use thin plastic ban. The following year the Malawian government began closing down illegal plastic manufacturers.

Last week Majiga-Kamoto was named one of the six winners of the 2021 Goldman Environmental Prize for her work on this issue. Michael Sutton, executive director of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, says Majiga-Kamoto's fight with the plastic lobby epitomizes the spirit of the prize. "She mustered the troops, the grassroots communities, to take on the government and big industry and won several times," Sutton says, "She not only won the ban in law, but is now holding the government's feet to the fire to enforce it."

And Majiga-Kamoto isn't letting up her pressure to uphold the single-use plastic ban anytime soon. Although she is trying to get some summer vacation time with her family — that is, if she isn't interrupted.

"I was just at the lake a couple of weeks ago and we were there just enjoying the beautiful lake and along come these pieces of plastic." Three plastic bags floated up closer to her, her son and her niece as they played in the water.

Majiga-Kamoto grabbed for the bags.

"My family was laughing to say, 'You shouldn't be working! You're at the lake!' And I'm like, 'But I can't just leave them in there!'"

Julia Simon is a regular contributor to NPR's podcasts and news desks focusing on climate change, energy, and business news.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Revelle Lecture Explores the Problem and Proposes Solutions

From N-95 masks that are protecting health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic to food packaging found in every aisle of the grocery store, plastics play an essential role in our lives.

The United States should create a national strategy by end of 2022 to reduce its outsized and increasing contribution to plastic waste in the world’s oceans.

Stanford engineers have developed a low-cost, plastic-based textile that, if woven into clothing, could cool your body far more efficiently than is possible with the natural or synthetic fabrics in clothes we wear today.

read more

A manager from Orbis weighs the benefits of opting for plastic rather than wood pallets.

Company announces additional investment in flow wrap equipment to reduce plastic packaging across three of its popular brands.

The handheld device can be used to secure cartons and other items in various packaging environments.

Multi-Conveyor recently built a series of stainless steel plastic chain conveyors, in stages, to transport both full and empty cases of food product through nearly 50 feet of conveyance.

The Parmesan Crisps brand will debut these updates at The 2022 Winter Fancy Food Show.

PM Engineer Chief Editor Nicole Krawcke sits down with Lance MacNevin, director of engineering, building and construction division of the Plastics Pipe Institute, to discuss top trends influencing the use of plastic pipes in commercial applications.

When it comes to beverage manufacturing and packaging practices, OEMs are creating the machinery necessary to help beverage-makers conserve and reduce their energy output. For plastic bottle manufacturing, it’s not just the increasing adoption of rPET plastic bottles, but also reducing the amount of carbon dioxide that it takes to power these machines, experts note.

As the beverage industry works toward tackling environmental degradation, experts highlight how sustainable packaging efforts are having an impact on plastic bottle manufacturing.

Given the high interest in sustainability from consumers, today’s plastic bottle manufacturers are taking the steps to ensure their business aligns with what consumers are looking for.

As sustainability has grown in importance to shoppers with environmental concerns, more beverage brands are using post-consumer recycled (PCR) content to support a circular economy.

Sustainability goals have affected the use of plastic packaging in the beverage market, and experts note how brands have handled that shift in preference.

Robert Singer, MD, FACS, has advocated for plastic surgery safety for over four decades

Lopa Yogesh Gupta, MD, has been recognized as a 2023 Castle Connolly Top Doctor — the eighth time she has received the prestigious Top Doctor honor.

TONTOTON is a plastic neutralization program offering a sustainable solution for the reduction of ocean plastics by rescuing non-recyclable plastic before it reaches the waterways.

Group's Resources Can Be Used to Maximize Impact

An innovative nonsurgical device, PoNS delivers electrical stimulation to the surface of the tongue to provide treatment of balance and gait deficits

Minnesota-based medical device start-ups receive design and additive manufacturing services

Performance Plastics is pleased to announce the promotion of Lear Jackson to Quality Manager.

Minnesota-based medical device start-up receives design and additive manufacturing services

Certification is part of the company's growth initiative to meet the increased demand for medical device contract manufacturing.

DPI's technical representatives and experienced team of engineers work closely with customers, assisting them with design for manufacturing and other value-added services.

Decades of Technical Advances Set Stage for Industry's Future; PPCA Library Now Holds Nearly 2,000 Technical Papers