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Wilmington, NC­­–based PolyQuest, a distributor of virgin and recycled thermoplastic resins, has trademarked its PQRenew line of recycled polyethylene terephthalate (rPET) bottle flake and resin. According to the company, it has produced more than one billion pounds of high-quality post-consumer rPET bottle flake, post-consumer rPET resin, and post-industrial rPET resin since 2006. These products are now branded as PQRenew. The trademarked product line includes amorphous or crystallized rPET that is clear,…

Gardner’s Allison Kline Miller, Ryan Delahanty and Rick Kline cut the ribbon on the inaugural PTXPO, alongside Rosemont Mayor Brad Stephens. Held March 29-31 at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Ill. the two-and-a-a-half day show went from brainstormed concept to concrete event in less than a year, seeking to scratch a geographic and time-based itch for an industry and a region craving an event after a pandemic-induced…

Editor’s note:  Gardner Business Media and its brands are lucky to have some amazingly talented and smart women in the company. March is Women’s History Month and as the month wraps up, some editors wanted to share a little about being a woman in manufacturing since working with Women in Manufacturing and reading Steel Toes and Stilettos: A True Story of Women Manufacturing Leaders and Lean Transformation Success by Shannon Karels and Kathy…

The UL 94 flame-retardance standard was developed by the then Underwriters Laboratories in the 1960s to address insurers’ concerns regarding fire hazards of cathode ray tube (CRT) televisions. To this day, it is a commonly applied parameter for the combustibility of plastic materials, despite such TVs being no longer in widespread use. Addressing advances in the electrical appliance industry, the International Electrical Commission (IEC) introduced the glow wire test standard…

When Rahm Emanuel, the White House Chief of Staff under President Obama at the time, famously said, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste,” he was referring to the Great Recession. It represents an opportunity, he went on to say, to do things and enact policies that seemed impossible before. The statement could equally apply to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, which revealed an alarming domestic shortage of…

Photo Credit: University of Burmingham This past January, we reported on a research team from U.K’s University of Brimingham and Duke University that have been collaborating on the development of a novel family of polymers from sustainable sources that reportedly retain all the same properties as typical thermoplastic elastomers, but are degradable and mechanically recyclable. The researchers used sugar-based starting materials—more specifically, isosorbide and isomannide compounds to create two polymers,…