A French company has developed a new way to reuse all those masks we've been using the past two years, converting them into school supplies such as rulers and protractors.
Plaxtil, based in Châtellerault, had already worked with a charity to use donated clothing that wasn't good enough to resell by extracting plastic fibers and turning them into something useful, Plaxtil co-founder Jean-Marc Neveu told public radio program Marketplace.
"When masks came along, we were all ready because disposable masks are practically all plastic fiber. Now, we have transformed 25 million of them," he said.
Plaxtil has placed bins to collect masks at city buildings, schools and businesses, he said.
After a decontamination process, the masks are converted first into a slurry, then molded into the school supplies. Those items are then donated to schools in the area.
A lot of brands are embracing the use of plastics that are recovered before they enter the world's oceans. But while it may be easy to market that idea, certifying that the material was actually "ocean bound" isn't quite as clear.
So safety and certification group UL and OceanCycle, a social enterprise group, are working together to create standards that will make it easier to know which plastics qualify as being recovered before it could reach the ocean, Karen Laird from our sister magazine Sustainable Plastics writes.
"Purchasers of OceanCycle Certified (OCC) materials [will] have end-to-end traceability, from bottle collection through manufacturing, and can rely on their meeting certain criteria," she writes.
To qualify, OCC materials must be able to prove they come from places at risk of entering oceans and must be ethically recovered — without using child labor, for instance.
The program will be similar to the standard developed by the Association of Plastic Recyclers for post-consumer recycled materials.
Another U.S.-made pickup truck is embracing composites.
The 2022 Toyota Tundra is being produced in Texas with a sheet molded compound box and tailgate cover produced by Teijin Automotive Technologies.
The full-size Tundra builds on the composite box Teijin makes for the compact Tacoma, allowing the automaker to reduce complexity and weight, with a 20 percent reduction in mass, PN's Sarah Kominek writes.
Composite boxes have had a slow growth since 2000 when Ford Motor Co. developed one for its compact Explorer Sport Trac, followed by Honda Motor Corp.'s Ridgeline in 2005. General Motors Co., meanwhile, opted for carbon-fiber for the box of its 2019 GMC Sierra Denali.
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