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Mexico-based petrochemical company Alpek announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Octal Holding for $620 million. A global supplier of PTA, PET, and EPS and the largest recycled PET (rPET) producer in the Americas, Alpek said that this acquisition “forward-integrates Alpek into the high-value PET sheet business segment, closes the gap toward achieving its environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals, and enhances its ability to serve its customers’…

Management is such a juggling act. If we managers didn’t have any employees, our jobs would be a breeze. The environment of economic class plays a huge role in the success of the employees we supervise and manage. Employees living in daily instability—meaning they don’t have enough resources for the day, let alone tomorrow—come to work worrying about paying the rent, not getting evicted, having enough gas in the car,…

Have you ever experienced the stress-inducing feeling known as FOMO? That’s the Fear of Missing Out, which can also be a problem in the hectic, fast-paced world of plastics. However, we offer you a solution: this slideshow gallery that reviews the five articles of January that drew the most attention based on PlasticsToday website metrics for page views. It indicates what on-trend topics the industry is keen to read. If…

Most packaging should be seen and not heard with rare exceptions that include on any occasion small, film-enclosed adjacent voids aka bubble wrap. That’s because the iconic packaging is made to protect and pop, though not necessarily in that order according to some devotees. Which brings us to today, January 31, celebrated as Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day. We’ve collected an eclectic mix of posts on Twitter where bubble wrap is…

Back in January 2017, we reported on the largest ever rear-quarter window sporting SABIC’s Lexan PC, which appeared on the then new-generation Buick GL8 and GL8 Avenir luxury multi-purpose vehicles MPVs introduced by the then-20-year-old joint venture of GM and SAIC Motors in China (SGM). Molded from Lexan PC from SABIC, it was 40% lighter and significantly more impact resistant that a comparable glass window, and also featured design elements…

If you’re the type who likes to bring their work home with them, that can be problematic when you’re in the injection molding field. Those machines won’t easily fit into your average home workshop, let alone through your front door. A couple of hobbyists in Canada have a solution — a DIY injection molding machine that can fit on almost any desktop. The video on the Action Box channel on Youtube describes the…

A draft re-evaluation of the “safe” daily intake of bisphenol A (BPA) by humans from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) is now making waves across the pond. Noting that the findings from EFSA indicate that BPA’s harmful effects can manifest at levels 5,000 times lower than what FDA considers safe, a coalition of physicians, scientists, and NGOs have petitioned FDA to set strict limits on the use of BPA…