Household products

Processors from around the world are starting to take an interest in keratin resin, derived from poultry feathers. Less dense than polyolefins, with a modulus of about 3-5 GPa and stress-to-break of 200-500 MPa, the material, a thermoplastic and biodegradable, can be molded neat or blended with standard thermoplastics to create "green" compounds.

Processors and parts designers attending the K show this fall have a golden opportunity to put a new haptic test through its paces. By monitoring how test persons touch an object, and comparing this with the stated objective perceptions, the test can help determine if a part's haptics really are as pleasing to potential customers as its designer had hoped.

Procter & Gamble, Sidel, and PTI report they have codeveloped the means to use injection stretch blowmolding to create a new type of container handle. The trio says benefits to extrusion blowmolding, the standard process for handleware, include 20%-25% material savings and a higher output per cavity.

Brazilian molder and moldmaker Jaguar Indústria e Comércio de Plásticos Ltda. (Jaguariúna) has invested approximately $18 million in 220,000m² of land in its current city where it plans to build a new 35,000m² facility. This summer, it also plans to take delivery of seven new injection molding machines, investing in all-electric and hybrid presses from Demag (four) and Arburg (three).

FRX Polymers Inc. (Chelmsford, MA) has started up a 50-ton DPP (DiPhenyl methyl phosphonate) plant and an application lab in support of its new family of inherently flame-retardant transparent polymers and oligomers. The DPP line currently runs on a 24/6 production schedule to produce what is a key raw material in the polymerization process of FRX's polyphosphonate polymers and oligomers.

This week the hotel chain, with just shy of 400 hotels across Europe, the Americas, and Africa, will announce its intent to have suppliers switch from standard thermoplastics to ones loaded with a special additive that causes thermoplastics to oxo-biodegrade at a controlled rate.    

Keyboards probably account for more words than pens and pencils, but there is still a massive market for the latter, and manufacturers of writing utensils increasingly are considering alternatives to established materials for their products.

Europe's market leader in household disposables, CeDo, plans to take off-cuts and unused pipe scrap from pipe processor Radius Systems and incorporate this scrap into CeDo's EcoMin range of trash bags. These bags already are processed from agricultural film scrap; new and novel is the addition of construction scrap.

Woojin Selex (Incheon, Korea) has opted for a full-package motion-control solution from B&R (Eggelsberg, Austria) in its latest TE series of all-electric injection molding machines.

A broad swath of 15 plastics industry suppliers participating in PlaticsToday's Executive Roundtable in Chicago last week agreed that the worst of the historic economic downturn is largely behind us. Their activity will bear that out. But they also cautioned that while the future is always (by definition) uncertain, the lessons of the immediate past can't be ignored by anyone who intends to stay in the game.