An article on the Business Daily Africa website describes how a new plastic bag from the agricultural technology firm Amiran is poised to resolve one of the most persistent problems afflicting Kenyan farmers, and a problem that causes them to lose billions of shillings every year.

A new polyethylene bag helps Kenyan farmers keep produce fresh longer. (Photo – IFDC Photography)

The Kenyan Farmers suffer economic losses due to being unable to preserve the freshness of produce beginning immediately after it is harvested. As a result, they often are forced to discard spoiled fruits and vegetables or to sell those on the verge of spoiling to middlemen at a significant loss. Lack of transportation and refrigeration infrastructure is largely to blame, and this problem is common to farmers in many emerging economies around the world.

Omry Karplus, the field operations manager for Amiran Kenya, makes it clear that the value of the Active Bag his company offers is due to the nature of the plastics film. “It looks like any other polythene material, but this is no ordinary plastic bag. It is special, and in a way revolutionary, because it changes the way farmers store their produce and saves them money,” he says.

Polythene is a British word for polyethylene, and as Karplus makes clear, this is no ordinary polyethylene. The bags can preserve fresh produce for up to a month after harvest, he says, because the film controls exchange of gases such as oxygen, carbon dioxide, and ethylene through the bag walls. Too much or not enough of those gases, depending on which gas it is, accelerates spoilage.

Amiran put the bags through a series of tests prior to launching, and according to Karplus the company is confident that the bags provide optimal levels of oxygen, carbon dioxide and ethylene. And they do more than that.

Because different types of produce require different storage temperatures to retain flavor, freshness, and appearance, Amiran has made bags with different levels of porosity. The bags are available with capacities of 0.5 kg to 20 kg (1.1 lb to 44 lb) and cost as little as 48 Kenyan shillings ($0.57). Adding to their value, Active Bags can be reused up to four times.

The Flexible Packaging Association(FPA) has given an FPA 2012 Achievement Award to plastic bag maker and recycler Hilex Poly Co. of Hartsville, SC for implementing Hilex’s Bag-2-Bag closed-loop recycling program with Kroger Company’s supermarkets.

Hilex Poly's Bag-2-Bag product line has won a Flexible Packaging Association Award for Sustainability and Environmental Achievement for its use by Kroger supermarkets.

The majority of the FPA awards honor a specific package, focusing on its printing, design, technical achievement or overall excellence. Hilex Poly’s award, however, is specifically for sustainability and environmental achievement, with the reasons clearly noted. Compared to conventional bags, the Bag-2-Bag requires 20 percent less energy to produce, lowers carbon emissions by 11 percent, diverts millions of pounds from landfills each year, and provides sustainability-conscious consumers a closed loop carryout package.

The retail bags are made using material recycled from plastic bags and other film that shoppers drop into Hilex Poly containers at retail stores such as Kroger’s. It has become very easy for consumers to recycle their bags properly thanks to the closed loop system set up by Hilex Poly.

Hilex Poly is a founding member of Progressive Bag Affiliates, which defends plastic bags and promotes recycling of all plastics film, including bags, and that as of January 1, 2012 has transitioned from the American Chemistry Council to SPI: The Plastics Industry Trade Association, where it will be known as the American Progressive Bag Alliance (ABPA).

With over 30,000 collection points across the country, mostly at retail stores such as Kroger’s supermarkets, Hilex Poly collects many plastic film products, which in turn are recycle into new bags, and into decking, piping, and playground equipment. As consumers have discovered the ease of using this system, Hilex’s recycling volume has increased by 50% over the last five years. Having invested tens of millions of dollars into its recycling facilities, Hilex Poly was able to recycle more than 20 million pounds of plastic film in last year.

Will the fungus discovered in the Amazon by a Yale University research group, and brought back to the school’s labs, where it showed it could consume polyurethane material, eventually dissolve all the plastics products foolishly thrown into landfills?

It’s far too soon to know, but the high activity currently on the Internet, might suggest ‘eventually’ is a short period of time. Terry Peters, SPI’s Senior Director of Technical & Industry affairs, found an article about the fungus at FastCoExist.com, a website of Fast Company magazine, under this headline:

“Fungi Discovered In The Amazon Will Eat Your Plastic”

Even though there are no exclamation points, maybe we should heed Peters’ advice: “Careful with those toys,” he says. Of course he’s joking, but let’s hope it isn’t repeated. We could have a panic, or if it’s true, no traffic on the Internet.

Pestalotiopsis-microspora, a newly-found fungus, degrades polyurethane in an anaerobic environment

The eco-bloggers recently demonstrated how quickly they can spread the word, for better or worse. A Google search on February 8^th for “Pestalotiopsis microspora plastic,” the name of the fungus, brought back 4830 results, many of them recent. Oops, the discovery was announced by Yale at the beginning of August, 2011.

A scientific paper “Biodegradation of Polyester Polyurethane by Endophytic Fungi” that appeared in the September 2011 issue of Applied Environmental Microbiology says several dozen endophytic (lives inside a plant) fungi were screened for their ability to degrade PUR. A number of them could, but two of them could use PUR as their sole carbon source under aerobic and, uniquely, under anaerobic conditions.

The inside of a landfill is an anaerobic environment, which may have sparked the idea that the newly discovered fungus could break down polyurethane entombed under other garbage, and if it could do that, it might also extract the carbon from other plastics in the heap.

The recently discovered Amazonian fungus has no trouble consuming polyurethane, even without oxygen.

Jonathan Russell, the Yale student who first saw that the fungus had consumed the polyurethane, expressed caution. “I don’t want it to be broadcast as the cure-all to pollution,” he told CNN, “but it’s a modest step towards a very important goal.”

Ming Tien, a Penn State biochemist who had experimented with fungi for decomposition, concurred, saying, “The question of whether these microbes can be used in the future is an engineering challenge. It’s a big leap to go from the test tube to the field.”

Back at the Yale labs, the work continues. According to Yale biochemistry professor Scott Strobel, one student is trying to find an organism that will biodegrade expanded polystyrene foam (EPS) and others are interested in finding more solutions similar to the fungus that eats polyurethane.

Promising as this research is, recycling remains the optimum solution for used plastic products in the foreseeable future. Keeping them out of landfills — garbage dumps as they long were known — is the first step in making that happen.

Let’s talk about Silly Putty, the stretchy, bouncy stuff in the plastic egg. Popular for more than 60 years, enshrined in museums, and loved by kids (of all ages), Silly Putty is nothing less than amazing. Yet this toy is simply a wad of unformed plastic material, not molded or formed in any way. More mazing still is how this enduring success came to be?

Silicone-based Silly Putty has been packaged in a rigid plastic egg since first marketed in 1950.

Early in World War II, Japan controlled much of the area where natural rubber originates. The call went out to American scientists: Develop a synthetic substitute. James Wright, an engineer experimenting in General Electric’s New Haven, CT lab, combined boric acid and silicone oil in a test tube, which yielded a gooey substance. He threw it on the floor and it bounced — very high.

This was not the sought-for synthetic rubber, but it was interesting. Yet despite GE’s efforts, no practical use was found for “bouncing putty.” Eventually, a toy store owner in New Haven, CT noticed it. Ruth Fallgatter and her marketing consultant Peter Hodgson put a written description into her toy catalog offering bouncing putty in a clear case for $2. It outsold everything in the catalog except for a 50-cent box of Crayola crayons.

Fallgatter lost interest but Hodgson saw potential. Already deeply in debt, he borrowed $147 to make a batch, packaged one-ounce wads in plastic eggs, priced them at $1 each, and decided on the name Silly Putty.

At the 1950 International Toy Fair in New York the toy marketers were generally negative about the putty, but Hodgson persisted and placed it with a few retail outlets, including Neiman-Marcus and Doubleday book shops.

Sculpting is one of many uses for Silly Putty

A few months later, a New Yorker magazine writer found it in Doubleday, wrote a story about it, and Hodgson got orders for more than 250,000 eggs of Silly Putty. Government restrictions on silicone due to the Korean War almost wiped him out, but those were lifted and by 1955 Silly Putty was popular with kids aged six to twelve.

Silly Putty scored a big hit at the 1961 U.S. Plastics Expo in Moscow, becoming the gift of choice for Americans visiting the Soviet Union. In 1968 Silly Putty went to the moon, literally. The Apollo 8 astronauts used it to secure tools and relieve boredom.

Peter Hodgson died in 1976, leaving an estate reported to be about $140 million. In 1977, Binney & Smith, the maker of Crayola crayons and other products, acquired the rights to Silly Putty and the putty has continued to bounce along since then.

Glow-in-the-dark Silly Putty plays like the original. They all do.

In 2000, a Silly Putty egg from the 1950s was displayed in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, part of the “Material World” exhibit of inventions and materials that have shaped American culture. The following year, Silly Putty was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame (Salem, OR), joining Crayola crayons, inducted three years prior.

Binney & Smith produces more than 20,000 eggs full of Silly Putty every day at its Easton, PA factory. There are versions that glow in the dark and others that change color in your hand, but 60 years after it hit the market, you can still bounce Silly Putty higher than a rubber ball, copy pictures onto it from a newspaper, shape it into fancy sculpture, smack it with a hammer (mind the bounce-back), or squeeze it to relieve tension or strengthen your grip.

A walk through the toy aisle of any store shows that a significant majority of children’s toys are made mostly or entirely of plastics. Silly Putty, however, is still its own category: a chunk of plastic material whose only moving part is the kid playing with it.

On Tuesdays you can find Wilma Groh, along with a group of family and friends, in the Cali

Made of 400 plastic grocery bags, this mat gives a homeless person a place to sleep.

Comfort Restaurant and Sports Bar in Spring Valley, CA, which is inland from San Diego. They are not there to party, though. They are there to weave sleeping mats for homeless people. But what they are weaving is plastic – used plastic grocery bags to be precise.

When people first see the mats they usually ask some variation of the same question: “That’s plastic?” Yes it is. The plastic bags are cut into loops about one to two inches wide. The loops then are tied together end to end, forming a type of yarn that Groh and her colleagues have named “plarn” for plastic yarn. The plarn is rolled into a ball and woven by hand to make the mats. Weaving, says Groh, is weaving, even if it is done with plastic.

The project got rolling in May of 2010 when Groh’s daughter showed her mother what she had found on line: a youth project weaving plastic.

Wilma Groh's hat is woven of plastic bags.

Groh, who is 89 years old and lives in the Monterrey Trellis Retirement Home close behind the restaurant, had always done weaving, crocheting, sewing and such, and was immediately interested.

Now, however, she does the work primarily by touch. Blind in one eye and having a degenerative condition in the other, she can see only blurry shapes and colors, which has not slowed her down even slightly. The group has woven more than 75 mats, and has expanded into making purses, hats, tote bags, coasters, ornaments, and more.

Bracelets and other items also are woven from plastic bags.

They sell the woven plastic items at craft shows and other events, with the proceeds going to a branch of San Diego Youth Services that works to get teens off the streets. Production material, meaning used plastic bags, has not been hard to come by, says Groh. They have over 20,000 bags on hand, from a variety of friendly sources.

Group members say what they are doing is very satisfying. Not only are they helping the homeless people, but they also are helping recycle the bags, and that keeps them out of landfills. It takes about 400 bags to make each mat. If it were laid out in a straight line, the yarn, make that plarn, would go almost ten miles.

Local and regional governments in India increasingly are laying down what the local media like to call plastic roads, which are in reality a mixture of recycled plastics and asphalt that doubles the life of the road surface, as well as increases local plastics recycling and decreases litter.

A road surface of recycled plastic and asphalt (bitumen) has doubled the life of plain asphalt roads in Chennai, India.

Just beginning to use the mixture is Chennai (formerly called Madras), a sprawling city of nearly 5 million people on India’s southeast coast. On January 4^th, Mayor Saidai Duraisamy was out inspecting Chennai’s first repaving of roads with plastic-asphalt compound in the city’s bustling T Nagar area. It was a good day to be mayor: He was able to assure motorists of better quality roads and tell area residents they were in the process of becoming a litter-free zone.

Though fighting litter and increasing recycling are factors, converting road surfaces to plastic-bitumen, as asphalt is called in India, is primarily a response to the rapid deterioration of all-asphalt roads caused by Chennai’s weather. Summer highs in the area often surpass 120ºF, humidity is high, monsoon rains are heavy, cyclones are not uncommon, and on top of all that, the volume of vehicle traffic is increasing as the city continues to grow.

Using a plastic-bitumen (asphalt) mix is improving road surfaces in many parts of India.

At about 10% by weight, the plastic portion of the compound is a mix of polybags, cups, and bottles. Recycled and powdered, the polymer is mixed into the asphalt where it becomes a flexible binding agent that helps the pavement resist high temperatures and keeps rainwater from penetrating. In the Chennai area a traditional all-asphalt road lasts four to five years before needing resurfacing; plastic-bitumen roads last up to ten years.

Although the plastic road costs slightly more than conventional straight asphalt, government leaders say the benefits greatly exceed the cost difference. Plastic-bitumen roads already are installed in other areas of India and more are planned. Chennai is one of India’s leading industrial centers, notable for software and information technology, as well as for its large share of India’s automobile manufacturing sector.

No matter how you celebrate the year-ending holidays, plastic products will be involved. Whether it’s the tinsel, the funny hats for New Year’s Eve (watch out for camera phones), or the high-tech electronic gadgets you give or receive, much of what you’re dealing with will be made of plastics, ranging from simple parts to highly engineered systems.

We could mention that it’s impossible to do much of anything these days without plastics in a key supporting role, but instead let’s look at two very different ways that polymers make the holiday season more fun, and even tastier.

A thank-you to Anne Clark, the VP for administration at SPI: The Plastics

Turkey roasted in a plastic oven bag looks and tastes great

Industry Trade Association, for reminding us how plastics make it easier to have a delicious roast turkey gracing your holiday table. For the recent Thanksgiving’s holiday, she decided to roast a large turkey in a food-safe plastic oven bag for the first time.

Roasting a turkey in a plastic oven bag is easy

She found that using the plastic oven bag reduced cooking time by an hour and eliminated the need to use the oven’s self-cleaning feature – two nice energy savers. The plastic oven bag also made it easier to transport the cooked bird to the house where it was served, and keep it warm. Most important, the roasted turkey looked great and tasted delicious.

The food-safe oven bags sold separately in supermarkets are strong, yet a meat thermometer inserted through the bag will tell you when roasting is done and the meat is still juicy. The bags work equally well with other meats.

Besides the joys of the dining table, many people consider their winter holidays incomplete if they don’t spend some quality time on ice skates. Thanks to the versatility of plastics you can enjoy your holiday skating even if you are wintering in Honolulu or Redwood City, California, a bit south of San Francisco. During this year’s holiday season, Redwood City residents are gliding across a 4000-square-foot skating rink in the town’s Courthouse Square. The rink’s surface, however, is a lubricated plastic material, not ice.

For skating, real ice must be kept at about 25ºF. Since daytime high temperatures in Redwood City around Christmas and New Year time are often above 60ºF, the energy bill for keeping the ice frozen would have broken the rink’s operating budget, so it was plastics to the rescue. Balmy temperatures present no problems or additional cost when using the plastic skating surface supplied by Artificial Ice Events.

The company, which was founded by a competitive speed skater, describes the surface as being like a “solid piece of countertop.” For easy gliding, the surface is periodically sprayed with silicone-based lubricant. Skaters use normal metal-bladed figure or hockey skates and employ the same technique as they would on real ice. Veteran skaters report that the “feel” is almost identical to gliding on frozen water, and it certainly looks that way.

Happy Holidays! And don’t forget the plastic.

A tip of the hat to Cal Dooley, president and CEO of the American Chemistry Council (ACC), for the article he published on November 28 in Roll Call adknowledging how the U.S. Capitol recently showed leadership in boosting the waste-to-energy process. On November 1^st, the Capitol campus began sending as much as 90 percent of its non-recycled solid waste to Covanta Energy’s waste-to-energy facility across the Potomac River in Alexandria, VA.

Non-recyclable trash from the U.S. Capitol now goes to a waste-to-fuel plant, not into a landfill.

Before the decision to do that by the Architect of the Capitol in collaboration with the House Administration Committee, the fuel traditionally referred to as waste had gone to landfills. Dooley noted that in 2010 more than 5300 tons of non-recycled waste was taken from the Congressional facilities, but instead of being buried the Capitol trash now will create enough energy to power a House of Representatives office building for several months. (Having recently been in one of those buildings on behalf of members of SPI: The Plastics Industry Trade Association, I can testify that those buildings are very large.

Plastics of various types are, of course, part of the Capitol trash. SPI and Dooley’s ACC have long made clear that although recycling plastics is always preferable, when energy can be recaptured from trash that will not be recycled, burying it makes no sense. The energy value of plastics is greater than that of coal, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) prefers waste-to-energy over landfills.

Dooley quotes an EPA finding that waste-to-energy makes electricity “with less environmental impact than almost any other source of electricity.” He then helpfully adds, “Yes, you read that right.” He must have been reading my mind.

Many SPI staff members have detailed the merits of waste-to-energy on this blog, for example here, here, and here. In

The Covanta Energy waste-to-fuel facility in Alexandria, VA

addition, the SPI website contains many articles spelling out the technology’s superiority to burying fuel in a landfill. Lately waste-to-energy is getting longer legs.

In a recent interview, Greg Wilkinson, president and CEO of the Canadian Plastics Industry Association (CPIA), who clearly favors turning waste to energy, was equally clear that the general public has a mindset problem: We think of this trash as waste that we need to hide or bury, so we hide or bury it.

I’m sure that SPI President/CEO Bill Carteaux could only guess at how many times he has spoken to business and industry groups in favor of waste-to-energy rather than waste-to-landfill. That has been the policy of SPI for some time, and likewise for ACC.

Lacking a statistical survey, I’ll estimate that waste-to-energy makes sense to nearly everyone in the plastics industry. It should make sense to everyone in the U.S. but it doesn’t. Some are concerned about environmental impact, regardless of the EPA statement above. Others take the NIMBY position – not in my back yard.

Those two factors could explain why Western Europe, with a population slightly larger than the U.S., has over 400 waste-to-energy plants, and more in the planning stages, while the U.S. has only 86. But to me the mindset problem Greg Wilkinson described is even more fundamental. So then, a quick rethink: That stuff’s not waste, it’s fuel. Pass it on.

As the result of a feasibility study conducted with three major manufacturers, UK-based Axion Consulting has confirmed that closed-loop recycling of post-consumer and retail waste plastic films could become a commercial reality within four years. Axion says supermarket waste plastic films can be turned into refuse bags, outside billboards, in-store displays, and shelving among other things that could be sold or used by the stores themselves.

Comingled post-consumer and post-retail plastic film was the feedstock for Axion's recycling strudy.

Axion’s research was funded by Water & Resources Action Programme (WRAP), a not-for-profit private company backed by government funding from England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, that helps businesses in those regions to reap the benefits of reducing waste, develop sustainable products, and use resources efficiently.

Roger Morton, Axion’s director, said the studies should give manufacturers confidence to invest in production capability, which in turn would stimulate local authorities to accept waste plastic films in their recycling collections.

One of the three UK manufacturers taking part in the feasibility include is CeDO, which successfully produced refuse sacks that met existing product specs using 100% UK-sourced recycled content from household waste. The other two companies, Centriforce and Protomax, focused on making boards from comingled film waste that could be made into shelving, panels, billboards and more. Both firms are continuing to work with retailers to open up market opportunities.

David Brookes, CeDo’s technical development director, says UK retailers are showing increasing signs of wanting to direct the plastic waste from the supply chain and retail stores back into products they sell. The technical foundation, he says, is critically important to deliver economic solutions. CeDO, he adds, will continue to develop technology for an economic closed-loop model for its customers in both the UK and all the EU.

The WRAP organization has a goal that states by 2015 it aims to develop a closed loop economy in the UK by driving up reuse and recycling and as a result reduce the quantity of packaging, textile, furniture, and electrical waste sent to landfill by 5%. That’s no small task But most agree that there is a strong desire on the part of UK residents to become greener, particularly in the area of recycling, and specifically plastic film.

Rigid board made from PCR plastic film can be made into a variety of products..

Protecting its national currency against counterfeiting was the primary motivation for Canada’s new currency, but business and environmental factors were also critical in the decision to switch the bank notes from paper to plastic. Plastic had a clear advantage on all fronts, including a smaller carbon footprint than paper, and the result is the issue of the $100 note, the first in the Polymer Series of printed currency. And a solid endorsement of the ecological efficiency of plastics.

Printing is sharper on plastic than on paper

Credit goes to an exceptionally thorough development program by the Bank of Canada, working with a team of physicists, chemists, engineers, and other technical experts assembled between 2001 and 2004, a period when counterfeiting of Canadian money was spiking upward. Planning of the Next Generation Project (of currency) began then, with an emphasis on stopping counterfeiting, and in 2006 the Bank announced it intended to issue a new series of notes starting in 2011.

Among the many security features are a holographic foil stripe in a clear vertical window. The stripe’s large, brilliant, complex images are visible from both sides of the note. Another smaller window shows the numbers of the note’s value in a circle, but only when viewed against a single-point light source. A traditional security feature, fine-line printing, is said by the Bank to be sharper on the polymer substrate than on paper, and indeed the visual images are very sharp. The printing includes raised lettering, numbers and Braille symbols.

Visible only with a single-point light source

Yet, while it’s great to be a step ahead of the counterfeiters with flashy, durable currency, the solution also has to be cost-efficient. The initial cost of the Polymer Series notes is about double that of paper alternatives, but since the Polymer Series notes should last at least 2.5 times longer (conservatively) in the Canadian environment than paper notes, there should save at least $200 million, or more than 25 percent of total production costs, during the assumed eight-year life of the series, compared with a similar level of counterfeiting deterrent on paper.

Attentive to environmental issues, the Bank commissioned a life-cycle study of bank notes in Canada that started with growing cotton for paper and making raw material for the polymer, and reached to the disposing of shredded worn bank notes, which will be recycled. Contributions to air and water pollution, climate change, ozone depletion and more were evaluated. The study showed that the Polymer notes, being lighter than paper, use less fuel to transport, important in a country as large as Canada. For every factor considered – energy for raw materials, processing resources, printing, and distribution – the polymer notes had the advantage over paper, in most cases by more than 30 percent.

The substrate for the new notes is Guardian biaxially-oriented polypropylene (BOPP) from Securency International of Australia, which has been used in the currencies of 32 countries since it first was adopted by the Reserve Bank of Australia in 1988. The printing process must be seen, and there is an excellent schematic of it on the Globe and Mail website. The just-introduced $100 Polymer note will be followed soon by the $50 bill, with the big change coming in late 2012 when the $20 note, is used in ATMs and being over half of all Canadian notes in circulation, is introduced. The Polymer Series – a fine title – will be complete when the $10 and $5 are issued in 2013.

Do you think anyone tried designing a transparent window into a paper bill? Sorry, couldn’t resist that one.