People from Wisconsin have long impressed me as a sensible bunch, so I’m not surprised that Madison, the state’s capital, has completely avoided the bag-ban/tax craze. Instead, the city simply added plastic bags to what it was collecting in its curbside recycling program, and enjoyed an immediate cut of a $17,800 expense from the annual municipal budget.

Madison, Wisconsin made plastic bags part of its normal curbside recycling program.

Madison already had a successful recycling program, recycling or composting over 57% of the city’s annual waste stream. But it wants to improve that. The 49,000 tons of waste going to the Dane County landfill each year is costing city taxpayers $1.38 million in landfill fees and another $544,000 in hauling costs.

Madison’s Streets Division currently is encouraging the city’s 67,000 households to go on a trash diet so they lose a pound a week – of waste. That would reduce waste-to-landfill volume by 5805 tons, or 12%.

Accepting plastic bags in the current curbside collection bins allowed the city to remove four plastic bag drop-off containers locate around town that were costing $17,800 per year to service. Instead of going to those locations, citizens now merely put their bags and other plastic film in a plastic bag, tie it, and drop it in their green recycling bins. The tied bag can be easily sorted out at the processing center.

Besides shopping bags, Madison’s program accepts newspaper, produce, bread, and food storage bags, shrink wrap, and heavier film such as that used to wrap appliances and mattresses, and any other film marked #2 HDPE or #4 LDPE,. Most area supermarkets will keep their plastic bag drop-offs since they are not part of the city’s program.

What impresses me most is how simply the City of Madison went about doing this: no drawn-out political hearings and arguments, no bans, taxes, or fees, and no new bureaucracy and administrative expenses. By bringing plastic bags and films into the existing recycling program, Madison can sell what it collects to a recycling company, thereby avoiding a potential litter problem while opening a new revenue stream. In theory, any city with a recycling program could do this, too.

Plastic bags and films are recyclable, no matter what you may read or hear, and recycling companies are clamoring for more. Keeping plastic bags and films in a closed loop system (use-recycle-reuse-recycle, etc.) keeps them out of the environment and makes good economic sense. In Madison, Wisconsin they figured that out.

Many of us think creating three-dimensional objects on your desktop directly from a computer design file is a thing of the future, possibly the distant future. Not so. This future is already here. As you read this, there are many of desktop 3D printers using various types of plastics to make three-dimensional objects and products, many of them quite complex.

Designed by the artist Bathsheba Grossman, this intricate lamp was produced by 3D printing.

The objects range from kitchen utensils to lamps to highly complex medical devices, and even to replacement or upgrade parts for the printer or a completely new printer. How does it work?

Greatly simplified, a 3D printer, guided by a CAD (computer automated design) file, deposits micro-thin layers of a raw material—usually a plastic resin in filament or powder form—one on top of the other and fuses them to form the object depicted in the CAD file. Design freedom is nearly unlimited, since intricate shapes, interior voids, and even moving parts can be created in a single process with high precision.

Forecasts are positive for these printers. They could enable virtually anyone to download a file and build a replacement part for an appliance or create a coffee mug, and that’s only the simpler consumer side of it. Larger, more sophisticated 3D printers have recently made a robot spider (see photo below) for surveillance and rescue work, and surgical scaffolding to hold human tissue as it is implanted in a human body to replace damaged parts. Material that mimics bone is currently being tested as well.

The Filabot desktop grinder/extruder creates feedstock for 3D printers by recycling plastic packaging.

A new and exciting aspect to this is that plastic objects like bottles and packaging could be recycled to make new products on compact 3D printers. An entrepreneurial mechanical engineering student at Vermont Technical College in Milton, VT, is working to make that happen right now. Tyler McNaney has developed a compact (24x12x12 inches) desktop grinder/extruder to let printer owners grind used milk jugs, soda bottles or other plastic parts, then extrude the plastic filament from which many desktop printers make 3D products. That means that raw material costs for owners of 3D printers would be virtually zero.

I spotted McNaney’s Filabot extrusion system on Kickstart.com, a website that uses crowd-sourcing to raise the funding that helps entrepreneurs get their new product ideas off the ground. What caught my attention first was the diminutive size of the extruder, and then I saw that it enables in-house recycling. Let me be absolutely clear: It can be done inside a house.

Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute created the nylon parts of this spidery rescue robot by 3D printing.

McNaney came to Kickstarter because it is designed to generate product development funding for entrepreneurs like him, and for his Filabot project, it is outdoing itself. McNaney’s goal was to raise $10,000 by January 23, 2012. When I saw his Kickstarter page on January 20, 127 backers had already pledged $22,438. UPDATE: When funding closed on  January 23rd, 156 backers had pledged a total of $32,330. Many of the nearly 100 comments on the site are from backers who own desktop 3D printers, and who seem to like the idea of recycling their soda bottles to make feedstock. It is hard not to like a material cost of zero.

High Speed Video Shows How 3D Printing Is Done

Let’s talk about Silly Putty, the stretchy, bouncy stuff in the plastic egg. Popular for more than 60 years, enshrined in museums, and loved by kids (of all ages), Silly Putty is nothing less than amazing. Yet this toy is simply a wad of unformed plastic material, not molded or formed in any way. More mazing still is how this enduring success came to be?

Silicone-based Silly Putty has been packaged in a rigid plastic egg since first marketed in 1950.

Early in World War II, Japan controlled much of the area where natural rubber originates. The call went out to American scientists: Develop a synthetic substitute. James Wright, an engineer experimenting in General Electric’s New Haven, CT lab, combined boric acid and silicone oil in a test tube, which yielded a gooey substance. He threw it on the floor and it bounced — very high.

This was not the sought-for synthetic rubber, but it was interesting. Yet despite GE’s efforts, no practical use was found for “bouncing putty.” Eventually, a toy store owner in New Haven, CT noticed it. Ruth Fallgatter and her marketing consultant Peter Hodgson put a written description into her toy catalog offering bouncing putty in a clear case for $2. It outsold everything in the catalog except for a 50-cent box of Crayola crayons.

Fallgatter lost interest but Hodgson saw potential. Already deeply in debt, he borrowed $147 to make a batch, packaged one-ounce wads in plastic eggs, priced them at $1 each, and decided on the name Silly Putty.

At the 1950 International Toy Fair in New York the toy marketers were generally negative about the putty, but Hodgson persisted and placed it with a few retail outlets, including Neiman-Marcus and Doubleday book shops.

Sculpting is one of many uses for Silly Putty

A few months later, a New Yorker magazine writer found it in Doubleday, wrote a story about it, and Hodgson got orders for more than 250,000 eggs of Silly Putty. Government restrictions on silicone due to the Korean War almost wiped him out, but those were lifted and by 1955 Silly Putty was popular with kids aged six to twelve.

Silly Putty scored a big hit at the 1961 U.S. Plastics Expo in Moscow, becoming the gift of choice for Americans visiting the Soviet Union. In 1968 Silly Putty went to the moon, literally. The Apollo 8 astronauts used it to secure tools and relieve boredom.

Peter Hodgson died in 1976, leaving an estate reported to be about $140 million. In 1977, Binney & Smith, the maker of Crayola crayons and other products, acquired the rights to Silly Putty and the putty has continued to bounce along since then.

Glow-in-the-dark Silly Putty plays like the original. They all do.

In 2000, a Silly Putty egg from the 1950s was displayed in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, part of the “Material World” exhibit of inventions and materials that have shaped American culture. The following year, Silly Putty was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame (Salem, OR), joining Crayola crayons, inducted three years prior.

Binney & Smith produces more than 20,000 eggs full of Silly Putty every day at its Easton, PA factory. There are versions that glow in the dark and others that change color in your hand, but 60 years after it hit the market, you can still bounce Silly Putty higher than a rubber ball, copy pictures onto it from a newspaper, shape it into fancy sculpture, smack it with a hammer (mind the bounce-back), or squeeze it to relieve tension or strengthen your grip.

A walk through the toy aisle of any store shows that a significant majority of children’s toys are made mostly or entirely of plastics. Silly Putty, however, is still its own category: a chunk of plastic material whose only moving part is the kid playing with it.

Chances are you have found through personal experience that, when it comes to environmental issues, friendly discussions can easily become disagreements and even serious arguments. The proposed bans of plastic bags is one of those issues, which is unfortunate because lack of good communication prevents the facts from becoming better known.

The folks at Bag The Ban, a website sponsored by bag maker and recycler Hilex Poly, have taken a lighter approach to the issue, offering help to those suffering from Bag Anxiety – the fear, shame or guilt that can result from using plastic grocery bags.

It only takes a few seconds of looking at BagAnxiety.com to know that the site has its  tongue firmly in its cheek, such as when it provides ways for readers to deal with snooty shoppers saying plastic bags are covering the world in garbage, or with a person saying the problem is that plastic bags are not recyclable — not that those aren’t all too probable.

The site’s humorous approach provides a way to supply factual info about plastic bags in a casual, friendly way. For example, it points out that far from covering the world in garbage, plastic bags are less than one percent of the waste stream. And there’s no need to make plastic bags recyclable because, well, they already are, the proof being that Hilex Poly and other firms are reprocessing millions of used bags every day to make new ones.

More than 854 million pounds of post-consumer plastics bags, sacks and wraps were recycled in 2009, and the percentage of bags and other plastics film products that are  recycled is growing year over year. The bags not only are reborn as new plastic bags, but also become decking, playground apparatus, pipes, and a myriad of other useful, durable items.

The Bag Anxiety site provides facts such as those along with many others about plastic bags to a general public that for far too long has been starved for positive information, and does so with a light touch and a smile. It’s an excellent counter-balance to the heavy-handed doom and gloom often used to frighten people about plastic bags, and the approach is bound to be far more productive than shouting matches.

SPI: The Plastics Industry Trade Association announced in December that the Progressive Bag Affiliates, which had been within the American Chemistry Council (ACC), would transition into SPI as the American Progressive Bag Alliance (APBA) effective January 1, 2012. The group includes America’s largest manufacturers of plastic bags, including Hilex Poly.

What’s Your Plastic Bag IQ?

The three injection molding companies vying to win the Plastics News’ Processor of the Year Award are each successful, creative, and high tech. They have well cultivated relationships with their clients, many of them long-term, and being exceptionally well managed, they excel at forward thinking. The judges face a formidable task.

The three finalists are: Bemis Manufacturing (Sheboygan Falls, WI), Rodon Group (Hatfield, PA), and Steinwall Inc. (Coon Rapids, MN). The winner of the award, which is exclusively sponsored by SPI: The Plastics Industry Trade Association, will be announced on January 31 at a ceremony during the Plastics News Executive Forum in Tampa, FL.

Only one can win the award, but there are no losers in this trio.

A global leader in toilet seat production, Bemis serves various other sectors, such as medical.

Bemis Manufacturing began making wooden toy wagons in 1901 and switched to making wooden toilet seats during the Great Depression. Molding plastic toilet seats began about 50 years ago and today the company says it is the world’s leading maker of toilet seats, wood and plastic. Sales for 2011 were $340 million, and though toilet seat revenues were flat, there has been solid growth in the Bemis molding-based Advanced Technology Group.

The company is a long-term and highly active member of SPI, and CEO/owner Peter Bemis, who was inducted into the Plastics Hall of Fame during the NPE2006 Show, has served on SPI’s National and Midwest Regional boards of directors, and often as a roving ambassador for the plastics industry.

That award judges particularly noted the company’s environmental efforts. Coinjection molding can be used to put recycled material inside a part surfaced in another material. Bemis’ energy-related projects have saved 11.5 million kilowatt-hours since 2001 by replacing lighting, using an enclosed water system, collecting rainwater in a settling pond, and web monitoring and metering of energy consumption.

The company, which is debt-free, has about 140 injection molding machines, including a 6600-ton Milacron system, and articulated robots service most of them. Bemis also runs 20 extrusion lines. There are about 1800 Bemis employees working at the Wisconsin headquarters and plants in North Carolina, Mexico, England, Italy, and China.

Rodon's automation and controls make it price-competitive with Chinese molders.

The best known part of the Rodon Group has to be its K’Nex line of interlocking construction toys, but the largest part is the custom injection molding that Irv Glickman began in 1956. Irv’s son Joel came up with the K’Nex product in the early nineties, Joel’s son-in-law currently is the third-generation family CEO, and Rodon is now 106 injection machines and 19 moldmakers working in its in-house tool shop.

Besides the K’Nex toys that make up roughly a third of its production, Rodon’s molding machines serve clients in the consumer products, medical, pharmaceutical, construction, and display sectors. It also molds and sells several proprietary lines of standard plugs, fasteners, and caps.

The American flag is prominent on the Rodon website, followed by, “Your high volume, small plastic parts specialist…Cheaper than China!” It does that with a skilled workforce of 88 people, plus automation and controls that let one operator run 15 machines, and not taking on assembly. Over the last four years customers have accepted 99.8% of the parts shipped, and Rodon last year took back production of 120 million-plus parts from China.

Steinwall's "Cocoon" white room holds 78ºF and 55% humidity year round, and dust is kept out.

Steinwall Inc. was acquired in 1985 from its founder Carl Steinwall by his daughter, Maureen Steinwall, the current CEO. Her innovations in computer-based training, video job instructions at the molding lines (currently migrating to iPads), and other methods to raise employee skill levels are so successful that you might miss how well Steinwall Inc. functions as a molder and as a business. The award judges noticed.

Company sales of $19.1 million for its fiscal 2011 are nearly three times the level of 2001. John Deere & Co. gave Steinwall a Supplier of the Year award for 2009 and will double its

volume of business with the company in 2012. Also in 2012, the company will move into a second building, making room for production systems from its new customer Bosch Security Systems, which is transferring its in-house molding operations, including 750 part numbers, to Steinwall Inc.

Following that transfer, Steinwall Inc. will be running 48 injection machines with clamp forces from 40 to 1750 tons. The company already had been investing in new molding technology, one example being its new electric 500-ton Toshiba EC machine with an MGS add-on second injection unity that makes a polycarbonate meter housing with brass inserts and an integral polyurethane gasket.

Along with making all that happen, Maureen Steinwall has been an SPI member since 1996, and an active participant in several parts of the association. Steinwall, who also was a finalist for the award last year, was nominated by SPI President & CEO Bill Carteaux. A strong supporter of the overall plastics industry, Steinwall will be an exhibitor at NPE2012 in Orlando, April 1-5. Stop by during the show.

Though all the finalists are family businesses, what matters to the award judges is that each of these three companies is an outstanding plastics processing business. Best wishes to them all.

For a detailed report on the three finalists by Bill Bregar of Plastics News click here.