The American Chemistry Council (ACC) has created a new coalition website to increase awareness of the many negative impacts that will result if a proposed ban of polystyrene (PS) foam foodservice products in New York City is enacted. The ACC says the site, which is called “Put a Lid On It NYC”, is aimed at encouraging city leaders to explore the opportunities for and advantages of recycling the PS foam items, rather than legislating a ban and having to enforce it.

The city’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, proposed the ban and it’s expected that the New York City Council will begin considering it soon. Momentum is already growing against the ban among restaurant owners and various industry organizations, and the information on the website will help business owners, as well as consumers, recognize the impacts and use them to make the case against the ban to their local elected officials.

Accordingly, the website’s first pull-down tab is “Get the Facts.” Click it and a compact listing of issues appears, with sections on recycling, environmental impacts, economic impacts, and the impacts specifically on businesses. To take just one area, contrary to what many read on the Internet and repeat, PS foam is being recycled right now, and it has been for decades. It’s not being done in New York City, but the Big Apple also not have commercial recycling available for paper-based foodservice items either.

The website makes clear that there already is a market for recycled PS foam in the tri-state (NJ/NY/CT) area, with an established recycling business in operation across the Hudson River in North Brunswick, NJ. The environmental and economic advantages of PS foam versus coated paperboard are similarly compelling.

One business owner, Elizabeth Sandigo of Grand Bakery in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, said, “ A ban is not the answer. I use these products because they work and because they are economical. The alternatives cost more, which will hurt my bottom line and my ability to create jobs. The City needs to stop adding to the burden of doing business here in the name of ineffective proposals that do nothing to address the issues they are meant to solve.”

The website’s other resources include news updates and recent announcements, downloadable research reports, information about communities already recycling polystyrene foam foodservice items, and how-to information for those wanting to contact their City Council member. And there’s more. Check it out for yourself at www.putalidonitnyc.com and you’ll be much better informed about PS foam recycling in general, as well as the particular situation in New York City.

Every person in the plastics industry can take pride in how plastics are solving some of the problems that for so long have afflicted people in many parts of Africa. A simple example: Put impure water in a plastic bottle, leave it in the sun about six hours, and the UV rays purify the water.

Here are two other noteworthy plastics-based solutions to African problems, one as simple as the plastic bottle water purification, the other an ingeniously creative life saver.

The simple first: “Plastic Bags to Keep Premature Babies Warm” is the headline of a short New York Times article whose hero is the plastic bag erroneously considered a villain by many. A study of newborn babies in Zambia showed that a technique practiced in the USA, swaddling premature babies in sterile plastic wrap to keep their body temperatures from dropping dangerously, can be copied in poorer countries using plastic bags similar to grocery bags.

Water evaporates rapidly through the thin skin of premature babies and that can lead to life threatening heat loss. The study published in the journal Pediatrics showed that wrapping babies in plastic bags and then in a blanket was better at keeping babies warm than a blanket alone, with no instances of overheating or skin rashes.

The AidPod medicine packages fit in the spaces between Coca-Cola bottles for travel to remote African villages.

Now the creative solution: The U.K.-based design firm pi Global, recently won the Diamond Award, the top honor at the 25^th anniversary edition of the DuPont Awards for Packaging Innovation, as well as the Special Food Security Award. Pi Global developed the AidPod package for ColaLife, an independent non-profit organization (NGO) that works with The Coca-Cola Company’s distribution network to bring medicines into remote areas of Africa.

A Eureka moment came to Simon Berry, a former British aid worker in Zambia, when he realized that he could get a Coca-Cola virtually anywhere, yet one in seven children were dying from preventable causes before turning five, most from dehydration due to diarrhea. Berry founded the ColaLife organization and is now its CEO.

The AidPod is purpose-designed to nest between the bottles in Coca-Cola crates (see photo), thereby gaining a ride to remote villages for life-saving medicine it carries. Pi Global created a package that is also a functional part of the kit, both as a measured-dose mixing container and a drinking vessel. Early in the AidPod’s development, according to Berry, plastics were selected over cardboard for barrier properties, light weight, and the ability to design in the dosage-measuring water cup.

The AidPod package took top honors in DuPont’s 2013 Packaging Innovation Awards.

In presenting the Diamond Award, William J. Harvey, President of DuPont Packaging & Industrial Polymers, pointed out that the awards originally sought to champion collaboration as a critical component in innovation. “Twenty-five years later … it’s clear that collaboration remains central to bringing innovation to market,” he said.

A blog post by plastics journalist Doug Smock on the PlasticsToday website details more of the AidPod collaboration: pi Global “…designed a patented wedge-shape, vacuum-formed container made of 80% recycled PET, the plastic used as virgin material in soda bottles. Other partners joined the effort. Charpack makes the container and lid; Amcor Flexibles produces P-Plus perforated peelable film to seal the pack closed; and Packaging Automation makes the machinery that heat-seals the film to the AidPod.”

Coca-Cola is generally considered the most recognized single brand in the world, and thanks to the company’s distribution skills, you can find a cold one pretty much anywhere in the world. The AidPod has the potential to improve world health on a large scale. Pretty impressive for a plastic package made mostly from recycled PET (polyester terephthalate).

Many articles about plastics on environmental websites and in mass media often state flatly that polystyrene foam, or even that all polystyrene cannot be recycled, which is the opposite of the truth. By way of proof, a recent article by Jessica Holbrook of Plastics News described Dart Container Corporation’s programs to increase recycling of EPS (expanded polystyrene) foam, and noted that Dart has been recycling EPS foam for about 20 years. (Note: EPS is commonly but incorrectly called Styrofoam, which is a Dow Chemical trademark for its building insulation.)

Dart (Mason, MI) is one of the largest producers of EPS foam food packaging and serving ware worldwide, and a major recycler of EPS as well. The company annually collects more than 1.5 million pounds of post-consumer polystyrene foam and since 1998 has recycled more than 60 million pounds.

Those are big numbers, but considering that EPS is about 95% air, the mass of what Dart recycles is, well, massive. The post-consumer EPS that Dart accepts and recycles at 18 of its plants worldwide (13 in North America) is subsequently used to make picture frames, building insulation, lumber and much more.

Holbrook spoke with Michael Westerfield, corporate director of recycling programs at Dart, and what comes through most clearly is the depth and breadth of Dart’s recycling program. Dart has many ways to make it easy for users of foam products to recycle them.

Dart Container’s PS foam recycling support includes collection/shipping containers such as this one.

For example, Dart’s Recycla-Pak program equips users of foam cups with corrugated recycling bins and everything else needed for collecting and returning foam cups to Dart for recycling, including pre-paid shipping. The company’s CARE program—Cups Are REcyclable—helps high volume users of foam food service items separate them from other materials, consolidate the collected material, and arrange to have it recycled.

The CARE program offers a densifier—a piece of equipment that compacts (densifies) large quantities of foam products into small, shippable units. That reduces the space used to store collected foam, the frequency of material pick-ups, and since it dramatically increases the pounds of foam in a truckload, it reduces the carbon footprint of the total recycling process.

Dart offers resources that simplify foam recycling to every type of EPS user, including consumers and local governments. In recent years, the company has expanded its support of curbside collection. Los Angeles began its first foam-recycling project in 2007 and today more than 65 California cities have access to curbside EPS recycling.

Dart’s comprehensive approach to foam recycling also can be seen in its internal operations. A recent regional dinner of SPI: The Plastics Industry Trade Association featured a plant tour of Dart’s 1.6 million sq. ft. Waxahachie, TX facility, including the recycling center that’s open to the public. Dart is an SPI member company. Those who toured the facility said they were very impressed by the technology and the overall organization.

In the Plastics News article, Dart’s Westerfield says, “Most people, when you talk to the general public, don’t even know foam is recyclable. The fact that we’ve overcome that and grown in such a short period of time, that’s very positive.” Dart’s efforts have not gone unnoticed. Earlier this year, the EPS Industry Alliance gave Dart Container its Excellence in EPS Recycling Award for “…extraordinary commitment to the advancement of expanded polystyrene recycling.”

Full Plastics News article here.

Until now, 3D printing of objects, most often using plastic materials, has taken place largely on a flat surface inside a closed chamber, with material added layer by layer and fused to create a solid object, all driven by a computer design file. But now a team of students at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) in Barcelona, Spain has taken 3D printing (additive manufacturing) ’outside the box’ — literally.

Anti-Gravity Object modeling is a departure from current 3D printing technology.

Petr Novikov and Saša Jokić of the IAAC created Mataerial, a new additive manufacturing process that prints plastic as a rod that sticks to horizontal, vertical, smooth or irregular surfaces and can be extended without the need for additional support structures.

The two students designed the equipment to carry out the Mataerial process during their internship at the Joris Laarman Lab in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. They equipped a multi-axis industrial robot with a nozzle that extrudes the 3D plastic rods. A computer design file dictates the shape and direction of the rods, just as with a flatbed 3D printer.

A key innovation with respect to current 3D printers is that “Anti-Gravity Object Modeling,” as the designers call it, uses two-component thermosetting polymer rather than the thermoplastic polymer used in flat 3D printers.

Thermoplastic materials enter a mold or extrusion die hot and harden as they cool. Conversely, thermoset materials solidify as they are heated. In this case, the chemical reaction between two unidentified components causes the material to solidify as it exits the nozzle, creating rods solid enough to form unsupported hanging curves.

The video below shows the process in operation. Extrusion speed for this process depends on factors including the material and the thickness of the extruded rod. In the video, the extrusion rate was about a meter in three minutes, however the video is played at 3X actual speed to show the process more quickly.

The happy little guy above is Kaiba Gionfriddo, 19 months old, having fun with every breath he takes, but if a brilliant medical team had not placed a 3D-printed plastic splint onto his bronchial airway to hold it open, it’s unlikely he would be alive today.

Kaiba was born with a rare condition called tracheobronchomalacia, which causes the airways to be weak and prone to collapse. Additionally, some of the arteries around his heart were malformed; encircling the trachea tightly enough to compress the airway.

Sadly, most parents only become aware of this when their child suddenly stops breathing and dies. Baby Kaiba stopped breathing and turned blue in a restaurant when he was six weeks old. His father, Bryan Gionfriddo, used CPR to revive him, but the episodes continued and Kaiba was put on a breathing machine when he was two months old. Despite the best treatments available, it was virtually certain that he would die soon.

Kaiba’s doctor in Youngstown, Ohio had learned that doctors at the University of Michigan were developing a solution for this problem and contacted them. The UM doctors’ solution was to put a tubular device around the trachea that would hold it open. The tube/scaffold/splint has small holes the surgeon can use to suture it in place.

Since this would be the first time the device was used on a human, the doctors requested and received special permission to proceed from their school’s advisory board and the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA).

University of Michigan doctors made a model of the trachea and then built the plastic splint using a 3D bioprinter.

The medical team made a model of Kaiba’s trachea and, using a program they developed, designed the tubular scaffold. The bioplastic material they used to build the scaffold on their 3D bioprinter is called polycaprolactone (PCL), a polymer approved by the FDA to fill small holes in the skull. The bioprinter melts the powder material and then builds the designed shape layer by micro-thin layer. The doctors made many of them in different sizes.

In February of 2012 the U. of Michigan surgical team carefully rearranged Kaiba’s twisted heart arteries and trachea, and then carefully placed the splint. And as soon as the splint was put in, the little lungs began moving up and down for the first time. The doctors say that in three years the material will be completely reabsorbed and excreted by the body, and the airways will be able to function on their own.

Kaiba went home three weeks after the surgery and has not had a breathing crisis since. His parents say he is learning how to get around and is being spoiled by his 6-year-old brother and 11-year-old sister.

The new procedure using the splint made by 3D printing  plastic material was made public this week by the medical team at the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI via an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. There is now hope for children born with this rare condition, where previously there was virtually none.

Polycaprolactone is a biodegradable polyester material, and the PCL used in 3D printing — also known as additive manufacturing (AM) — is a special grade of the material. Probably the most common use of PCL is in the manufacturing of polyurethane materials, where it helps achieve good water, oil, solvent, and chlorine resistance. It is also added to other resins to improve their processing and certain end-product properties, for example impact resistance.