Polymers Petrochemicals Recycling Bioplastic 30-01-2019 - Arhive

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  • Crude Oil Prices Trend

Polymers Petrochemicals Recycling Bioplastic

Oil prices rebound from steep losses in the previous session.

Washington imposes sanctions on Venezuelan state-owned oil firm PDVSA.

Analysts say the fundamental issue for global oil trade remains plentiful supply.

Oil prices rebounded on Tuesday from steep losses in the previous session after Washington imposed sanctions on Venezuelan state-owned oil firm PDVSA in a move that may curb the country’s crude exports.

Despite the move, which comes as the U.S government looks to pile pressure on President Nicolas Maduro to step down, traders said ample global oil supply and an economic slowdown, especially in China, were keeping crude prices in check.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures were up $1.40, or 2.7 percent, at $53.39 per barrel around 11:55 a.m. ET (1655 GMT). WTI fell 3.2 percent in the previous session.

Polymers Petrochemicals Recycling Bioplastic

Roger Kilburn, CEO of the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre, tells why where can find green alternatives to scare natural resources

You might never have heard of industrial biotechnology – IB for short – but the chances are it has benefited your life.

Whether it is turning food waste into green energy or improving the way we manufacture food, drink, vaccines and antibiotics, IB offers advantages for us all.

As the worldâ™s population grows, it consumes more food, energy, materials and medicine with every passing year, and to meet these needs we rely heavily on our chemical industry. At the beginning of the 20th century, the chemical industry was tiny, and by the millennium it had grown to become one of the largest in the world.

Polymers Petrochemicals Recycling Bioplastic

A Peoria-based upstart company is utilizing a new technology that replaces petroleum-based plastics with cellulosic material such as industrial hemp and other fiber crops that farmers can grow.

“Two-thirds of the tonnage of all textiles in the world is plastic. Polyester is one example. That could be replaced by things like recycled cotton, flax, industrial hemp and all sorts of nice fibers you can grow,” Luke Haverhals, Natural Fiber Welding founder and CEO, said at the industrial hemp farm forum.

Haverhals discovered the new technology as an assistant research professor for the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

It is fair to say that in recent years no two scientific papers have attracted more public attention and mainstream media headlines than the following: ‘Indonesia is the second Largest Marine Polluter in the World’; and ‘Ten Rivers contribute 93 per cent of Ocean Plastics’.

Those headlines, with many other variations, have been doing the rounds; are quoted, re-quoted, misquoted, extracted, cut and pasted into other articles and used as 90-second simplistic click-bait insta-news memegram videos designed both to shock and horrify millennials who have no time to read an article or sit down and watch an entire episode of David Attenborough’s Blue Planet or Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth without checking their Facebook.

Indonesia, the world’s second largest ocean polluter

Polymers Petrochemicals Recycling Bioplastic

The UK could be set for a robot revolution in food production as a result of Brexit, says packaging machinery manufacturer Ilapak.

Claims Tony McDonald, sales and marketing director of the company, one of the main barriers to greater uptake of automation, particularly amongst SMEs, is the cost of unskilled labour versus investment in robotics technology.

“Thanks to the EU’s free movement of workers, Britain’s food and drink industry has benefitted from cheap labour for a number of years – in fact, it employs the highest share of EU migrant workers (30 per cent) compared with any other UK sector, employing around one fifth of the two million EU nationals working in Britain,” he said.

“But Brexit is set to change the labour landscape in just a few short years. The Food and Drink Federation (FDF) reported that 47 per cent of companies in Britain’s food supply chain said their EU workers were considering their future as a direct result of the June 2016 Brexit vote.

Polymers Petrochemicals Recycling Bioplastic

Porcher Sport, the Sports and Leisure division of Porcher Industries, is elevating levels of safety for skiers and snow boarders with a new ultra-lightweight avalanche airbag fabric that will be launched at ISPO Munich, next week.

Considered the lightest fabric on the market with a super low weight of just 132g/m2, Porcher Sport’s new performance fabric is proven to reduce the weight of avalanche bags by more than 12%, the company reports.

Treated with an in-house formulated PU coating that is designed to resist the harshest of conditions, the material also boasts tear resistance, more than 50% higher than other airbag fabrics. Repackable and compact, the fabric is designed to ensure the airbag can also be used for multiple deployments.

Polymers Petrochemicals Recycling Bioplastic

Creative collaboration with Calida blends bio-based fabric with fashion

Naia™, Eastman’s cellulose acetate yarn, showcased its sustainability and versatility at Interfilière Paris, the international event for lingerie, activewear materials and accessories, Jan. 19-21. At the show, Naia™ partnered with Jos Berry, founder and CEO of Concepts Paris, to present a session on consumer insights and emerging opportunities for apparel manufacturers in the bio-economy.

“Sustainable activism in the fashion world is finally coming out of the shadows and entering the mainstream dialogue,” said Eastman Market Insights Leader Justin Coates, who co-hosted the conference entitled Empowering Lingerie’s Uniqueness. “Our latest research into the minds of sustainably-minded consumers reveals a large demand for more sustainable material education across the consumer shopping journey.”

Polymers Petrochemicals Recycling Bioplastic

The Indian economy is still performing well, with foreign investment and looser regulations driving significant growth in the country. However, low living standards and a host of socioeconomic issues are impeding its ascension to ‘developed’ market status

“Let the whole world hear it loud and clear. India is now wide awake. We shall prevail. We shall overcome.”

Those iconic words were spoken in 1991 by India’s finance minister at the time, Manmohan Singh, when the country embarked upon its most innovative economic reform yet. Since then, India has experienced extraordinary financial growth (see Fig 1), and is now the world’s sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP. The IMF predicts that by the end of 2018, India will have moved into fifth place, knocking the UK from the position that it has occupied since 2014.

Polymers Petrochemicals Recycling Bioplastic

Founded in 2017, the embryonic Polyolefin Circular Economy Platform (PCEP) project is starting to take shape. On taking on the role of chairman in December 2018, David Baker  spoke to Tim Sykes about the organisation’s aims and the conclusions of its recent workshop.

Polyolefins account for 70 per cent of plastic packaging in Europe. Of the 27 million tons of post-consumer plastic waste collected in Europe in 2016, 16 million were polyolefins, 12 million of which are packaging. Against the backdrop of EU Commission pressure to increase recycled polymers from three to ten million tons by 2025, these statistics underline the timely insight of founding partners PlasticsEurope and EuPC: namely, that the polyolefin value chain, lacking a platform analogous to PET’s Petcore, could really do with a unifying body to identify the barriers and opportunities around recycling rates.

Polymers Petrochemicals Recycling Bioplastic

Avantium has retaken full ownership of its YXY plants-to-plastics technology through the purchase of BASF’s shares in the Synvina joint venture, and named Marcel Lubben as Synvina’s managing director to lead its commercialisation.

As agreed in the joint venture agreement, Avantium paid BASF €13.7 million ($15.6m) for its equity stake in Synvina, while a net payment of €3.7m ($4.2m) was made for full ownership of the assets acquired by Synvina in the last two years.

YXY technology catalytically converts plant-based sugars into FDCA (furandicarboxylic acid) and materials such as the new plant-based packaging material PEF (polyethylenefuranoate). PEF is seen as a viable alternative to PET. Avantium is aiming to commercialise YXY during the first half of this year.

Polymers Petrochemicals Recycling Bioplastic

French car parts company Faurecia said it would launch on Jan. 30 its tender offer to buy out Japanese car navigation system maker Clarion as part of its previously announced $1.3 billion takeover of Clarion from Hitachi.

The Clarion takeover is the latest in a flurry of deals among car components businesses, which are trying to keep up with a shift by car makers into new technologies such as autonomous driving, connected cars and electric vehicles.

Clarion shareholders will be offered a chance to tender their shares by February 28, 2019 at a price of 2,500 yen per Clarion share, Faurecia said on Tuesday.

Polymers Petrochemicals Recycling Bioplastic

A relaxation in the type ofpost-consumer polyethylene terephthalate (PET)bottles that Germany allows to enter itsdeposit scheme is expected to increase recycledpolyethylene terephthalate (R-PET)contamination rates, according to marketsources on Tuesday.

PET recyclingFrom1 January, Germany began allowing post-consumerPET milk and juice bottles to be returned todeposit schemes, whereas previously onlypost-consumer water and soft-drink bottles wereallowed.

“In the past there were only carbonated softdrinks allowed for one-way PET bottle depositand excluded were bottles like juice or milkbottles with a barrier.

“Now to reach higher return rates they decidedto put in the milk and PET juice bottles adeposit.  [It will mean] higher wastagerates from the barrier, or lower quality,” aflake and food-grade pellet producer said.

PET milk and juice bottles typically includebarriers composed of other plastic material,leading to cross contamination. This placesadditional pressure on flake and pelletproducers to sort material to removecontaminants prior to processing and has thepotential to increase wastage rates.

“You can guarantee we will get more milkcontaminants as a result. It means more carefulsorting and they put that as the responsibilityof the recycler, the price remains the same,” aEuropean flake producer said.

 

Polymers Petrochemicals Recycling Bioplastic