Dow Chemical has made everyone sit up and take notice when it announced that it will be forming a new $20 billion company with Saudi Aramco, the state-owned major oil company of Saudi Arabia. Andrew Turley of Chemistry World reports the new company, called Sadara, will feature 26 integrated manufacturing units to producing three million [...]
Dow and Aramco Launch Huge Polymer and Other Petrochemicals Project
July 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Fire at California Plastics Plant
July 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment
An inferno raged at a plastics plant in Fairfield, California, on Tuesday. An Associated Press report carried in the Los Angeles Times said the fire broke out in the afternoon at an outdoor storage area of the Macro Plastics Inc. complex near Travis Air Force Base. No building damage or injuries were reported. Sixty firefighters and 21 [...]
Sweet Deal in Polymer and Plastic Production
July 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment
The Japanese company Mitsui & Co. is partnering with the American chemical giant Dow Chemical to build a biopolymers complex in Brazil, reports Senior Editor Alex Tullo for Chemical & Engineering News. The complex will oversee the entire process, starting from sugarcane cultivation and going all the way to producing plastics for home electronics, food [...]
Pacific Plastic Problem Looks Grim
July 26, 2011 By 1 Comment
News about the marine plastic problem isn’t very uplighfting these days. The first scientific results from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California San Diego (UCSD) offer a bleak view of an area of the ocean that has been dubbed as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Peter Davison and Rebecca Asch with the Scripps [...]
Saving Plastic Art
July 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment
In some cases, we want plastic to disintegrate and disappear, such as in bags, bottles, and cutlery. But when it comes to art, we want plastics to last forever. But as Senior Editor Sarah Everts reports in Chemical & Engineering News, plastics don’t last forever, and there is whole scientific craft now emerging to save [...]
1939 World Fair Plastic “Ghost Car” Up for Auction
July 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment
A Pontiac Deluxe Six, often called the “Ghost Car,” was a star attraction at the New York World Fair in 1939. It was covered in a plastic called Plexiglas, so that people could see the inner workings of a car. The Wall Street Journal reports the car will be auctioned July 30 at the RM [...]
Plastic-Producing Potato Sites Vandalized
July 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment
On the nights of July 9 and 11, masked attackers vandalized two experimental sites in Germany growing genetically modified wheat and potatoes. The potatoes were producing a raw material in plastic manufacturing. As Gretchen Vogel reports in ScienceInsider: Kerstin Schmidt, head of Biovativ, the company that owns the test plots in Gross Lüsewitz, told German [...]
Cancer Patient Saved by Windpipe Made From Polymer and Other Materials
July 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Last month, doctors switched out a cancer-stricken windpipe of a patient with a polymer-based organ made in a lab. The operation was a landmark achievement in regenerative medicine. Gautam Naik at The Wall Street Journal reported that the patient no longer has cancer and is expected to have a normal life expectancy. Naik wrote: The [...]
Teasing Out Properties of Clay-Polymer Fire Retardants
July 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment
There are people who literally play with fire. A team of U.S. scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and University of Maryland (UMD) have figured out how to improve a type of fire retardant that contains clay and polymers. They recently demonstrated that the fire retardant material worked better against flames when the nanoscale plates [...]
Canada Introduces Polymer Money
July 18, 2011 By 1 Comment
Canada has joined a number of other countries in making its banknotes out of a polymer instead of paper. Bank of Canada announced new banknotes last month. The banknotes will be gradually put into circulation by the end of 2013. The bank has made the move to make the banknotes more difficult to counterfeit. As [...]
