Estée Lauder is a name you expect to see at makeup counters, not in Plastics News. Perhaps it's time to reimagine that company's reach.
The cosmetics brand is the financial supporter of a National Renewable Energy Laboratory study that will send plastics to the International Space Station next year to conduct an experiment involving bacteria engineered to upcycle plastic.
The Center for the Advancement of Science in Space selected the NREL project as part of the ISS National Laboratory Sustainability Challenge: Beyond Plastics, the laboratory said in a news release.
The project will see astronauts to expose a "mixture of oxidized plastic waste" — from an expanded polystyrene cup, a Dr Pepper PET bottle and a high density polyethylene milk jug — to an engineered strain of the bacteria pseudomonas putida.
NREL polymer scientist Katrina Knauer and Allison Werner, a cell and molecular biologist, will work directly with astronauts to prepare them for the experiments.
This isn't Estée Lauder's first investment in high-tech recycling programs for plastics. It is among the companies that have signed multiyear supply agreements to buy material from an Eastman Chemical Co. chemical recycling plant being built in France.
When PN received word that Gottfried Mehnert, the founder of blow molding machinery maker Bekum Group, had died, it gave me an excuse to go back and look at a profile Bill Bregar wrote about him in 2006 when Mehnert was named to the Plastics Hall of Fame.
One thing that stood out to me, as a bit of a history nerd, was to see how the Cold War helped set the stage for the creation of Bekum blow molding machines.
Mehnert's father, Rudolf Mehnert, had owned a company that did injection molding and made tooling and machines in a region that was then part of East Germany. When the government confiscated the company, the family fled to the portion of Berlin controlled by Western powers, including the U.S. (this was shortly before the Berlin Wall was built), and started another company.
But as the wall went up and West Berlin was cut off from the rest of West Germany, it became clear that the city needed a local source of plastic bottles. So Gottfried Mehnert designed and developed a blow molding machine, Bill wrote.
"Customers pushed us to produce bottles," Mehnert told Bill in 2006. "We could only ensure quick success by building our own machines."
You can find the complete story here.
Sending a kid to school is expensive. Before the start of each year, parents receive a list of everything their child needs: Notebooks, pens and pencils are the obvious items, but then add in glue, markers, hand sanitizer, tissues and file folders — not to mention back-to-school clothes — and it all adds up.
Jones Plastic & Engineering workers in Jeffersontown, Ky., however, are getting some help with all those expenses.
The injection molder collected supplies for 249 workers who signed up in advance to collect items needed for kids ranging from kindergarten to college, the Times Tribune of London, Ky., wrote.
The company last hosted a school supply pickup event in 2019. Any items not used by Jones Plastic employees will be donated to local schools.
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