I have one bachelor's and two master's degrees -- none is anywhere near science and technology. But converting solar energy to mechanical movement without any aid but a plastic motor sounds really awesome to me.

Nanowerk LLC of Honolulu, Hawaii, described the significance of the plastic motor in a June 20 release: for the first time, researchers have succeeded in amplifying the minuscule change in structure at a molecular level caused by an external stimulus (light) to a macroscopic change through a cooperative effect of liquid crystals. The polymer used to make the photomechanical device is liquid-crystalline elastomer, combing both properties of liquid crystals and elastomers.

Take a first look at our brand new online Photo Gallery.

It features eight photos on how China's plastic bag ban is enforced in Guangzhou, capital city of Guangdong province. Plastics News Asia bureau chief Steve Toloken and photographer Jennifer Tomlinson took the photos and provided the report.

Plastics News and its partner CBI (Shanghai) Co. Ltd. are bringing global readers the latest resin pricing intelligence in the Chinese market from on the ground.

The China Price Monitor is supplied by CBI with up-to-date China market prices of polyolefin resins. It monitors supply/demand trends, imports and exports, plant closures and production outages. Readers will find the report rotate on a weekly basis between 1) high density polyethylene, 2) low density and linear low density polyethylene, and 3) polypropylene.

CBI has a professional team dedicated to the report, making about 200 calls to buyers and sellers in China each week for each issue. The CBI China Price Monitor, with brief commentary in both Chinese and English, offers open access to all readers.

A Chinese researcher at a state-owned energy think tank said that in the future the amount of energy it takes to produce a product will be found on product packaging.

Mr. Jiang Kejun said the research institute in Beijing is working to analyze the energy consumption of products used in people's daily lives. "For example, the amount of energy used to make an A4 size sheet of paper is about 0.1 kilowatt-hours," he told a Chinese publication.

Well, that energy tag may help plastic bags regain some share lost to paper bags, since the production of paper bags uses more energy than plastic bags.

But, researchers, especially those who advise governments on policies, should really look at the whole picture rather than one single parameter. What about carbon footprint? What about reusability? What about recyclability?

And, how much energy does it cost to produce the energy tag, starting with figuring out the amount of energy in every commodity? Will it be worthwhile?

We've seen plenty of press coverage about China's new labor contract law and its attendant rise in wages and improved benefits packages. But it would be naive to believe that Chinese workers now feel happy and secure. In reality, they are vulnerable and often thrown into unusual situations -- such as arriving at work to find that their bosses are no-shows.

Such was the case for more than 1,000 workers of Xinyao Techonology Co. Ltd. -- a plastic molder in Shunde, Guangdong province -- who responded with extreme action when company management didn't show up for work last week, according to local media. Rumors spread quickly among the workers, who had not yet received their June paychecks, and they believed that the owner was unable to pay them because of a huge loss in the stock market.

To make up for their overdue paycheck, 1,000 day-shift workers scrambled to collect raw materials and equipment from the factory.

Local police rushed to the site, stopped the mad scene and retrieved the items that had been removed from the factory. Labor authorities are now on the case and in talks with the owner.

You may wonder why workers didn't seek legal protection instead of looting the factory. I see it as a manifestation of people's discontent and lack of faith in the legal system. In order to change that mind-set, the government will need to resolve all labor-relations cases in a consistent, fair and effective manner in the years to come.

Refiner and petrochemical giant China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. (Sinopec) has made gasoline production a priority over plastic resins in response to the long lines at gas stations across China.

The company told Dow Jones Newswire that it plans to cut production of naphtha and petrochemical products in July and at the same time increase diesel production.

Sinopec will continue to reduce ethylene production in July, by at least 12 percent.

On the flip side, two Sinopec ethylene lines in Maoming, Guangdong province, with combined capacity of 1 million metric tons, have resumed production, after a temporary closedown caused by a lightning strike June 3.

Not so long ago major U.S. airlines were scrambling for passes to fly to China. Now, some of those airlines that "luckily" obtained China routes from the U.S. Department of Transportation want to halt services.

Taking the lead are US Airways Group and Northeast Airlines. Both have received permission from the DOT to suspend some of their China-bound flights without losing their rights to operate to the region in the future, said a Bloomberg report.

Through-the-roof fuel costs are blamed for the step-back.

US Airways also plans to delay the launch of its Philadelphia-Beijing service to March 25, 2010. United Airlines said in May that it will delay the launch of service between San Francisco and Guangzhou to June 2009.

In my experience over the years, it's become a luxury to sit next to an empty seat in the main cabin on direct flights between the U.S. and China (same thing with domestic U.S. flights). Planes are getting fuller, airfares higher, and meals simpler. Now should we start to worry about securing a seat?

Perhaps inspired by its neighbor China's success in the recycling business, North Korea is seeking supplies of plastic and electronics waste that "can be processed in the port but which other countries and territories are restricted from dealing in," the U.K.'s The Telegraph quoted a North Korea-based Chinese-language Web site as saying.

So I asked myself, what advantage does North Korea have in plastic recycling? The first benefit that came to mind was the offset of the country's extremely low labor cost against the labor-intensive sorting involved in recycling. In addition, the country has expressed its willingness to take in waste that other countries refuse to accept.

The country's disadvantages include the lack of technology, equipment and experience, but that could be solved through a good foreign partner. Logistics is another issue. North Korea doesn't have much processing capacity, and if the regrinds are destined to other countries, the freight cost will dent the margin, versus China's model of recycling waste and consuming the regrind materials locally. But if North Korea intends to use the reprocessed resins to make goods for its domestic market, that will make sense. That way the country could effectively compete with plastic products imported from countries like China.

I suppose that China, Russia and South Korea, which all border North Korea, will watch with caution the environmental impact of waste processing in North Korea.

For background information, read PN's fresh report India probes allegation of China injection press dumping.

It's not the first trade dispute between the two of world's fastest-growing economies, but the anti-dumping investigation India's Ministry of Commerce is starting on Chinese injection presses is quite interesting and may have significant fall-out.

In the official notification, the Indian government not only mentioned the applicant L&T Demag Plastic Machinery Ltd. of Chennai, but also specifically noted that "there are three other companies which are known to have the capacities to produce the subject goods in India: Ferromatik Milacron India Ltd. of Ahmedabad, Windsor Machines Ltd. of Thane and Electronica Machine Tools Ltd. of Pune."

Maybe the government believed that these three companies -- all non-applicants -- are major domestic players in the field. But note the significant foreign ownership in these enterprises. L&T Demag and Ferromatik Milacron India are foreign-invested, and Windsor used to be foreign-invested. The only local company, Electronica, makes just 100 machines of its own per year, and imports 400 presses from China's Haitian Group.

Machinery industry sources said that the biggest Chinese brands sold in India appear to be Ningbo Haitian Group Ltd. of Ningbo; Zhejiang Sound Machinery Manufacture Co. Ltd. in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province; and Chen Hsong Group of Hong Kong.

At least two of the big three, Haitian and Sound, already have assembly facilities in India. So if penalties were imposed to whole presses, Haitian and Sound could ship parts to India and assemble machines locally. Other companies can certainly follow the suit.

Of course, jobs and investment will come with the assembly work from China to India. India wouldn't mind that.

The probe could also have an impact on Chinese participation in the big PlastIndia show, coming up Feb. 4-9, 2009, in New Delhi, according to an Indian source who talked to one of our reporters. And the two countries currently plan to organize an India-China Plastics Summit in conjunction with that show. This move could add a new dynamic to those proceedings.

I'm having a hard time immediately finding how many Chinese exhibitors participated in the last PlastIndia show, in 2006. But I've not been impressed with the Indian presence at Chinaplas -- Asia's largest plastics show. There were only six Indian exhibitors at Chinaplas earlier this year, down from nine in 2007.

We'll watch it closely and keep you updated.

Two American business professors lead a survey of Chinese workers and published some of the results in an article headlined Misunderstanding the Chinese Worker in the Wall Street Journal.

In a nutshell, the study found that the West's perception that Chinese workers are motivated only by salary may be outdated and wrong. It points out that "Cultural shifts in China have altered social networks, leaving some workers there looking to employers for a sense of affiliation," and "nonmonetary incentives such as training, time off and community building might help multinational companies attract and retain workers in China."

I chatted with some friends including a head hunter in Shanghai on the subject. I was told that multinational companies are no longer the only top choice for Chinese talents.

When Western companies first set up shops in China in the early 1980s, up until the mid- to late-1990s Chinese local employees at Western companies took pride in their income, which was higher than Chinese state-owned companies and domestic private enterprises by a large margin. That gap has since been shrinking, as Chinese state-owned and private companies catch up on compensation.

More importantly, the absence of an efficient social security and health-care system has made people realize that money doesn't bring a sense of security. "The average government employee's base salary is still lower than his/her counterpart with multinational companies," my head hunter friend said, "but you pretty much have zero pressure at work, don't need to work overtime and also enjoy all kinds of benefits and additional income." Typical benefits can be anything from overseas vacations to a monthly garment fee; gym passes to quarterly bonuses for working in summer (called High Temperature Allowance); right down to cash, gift cards and food items.

Most importantly, state-run company workers never need to worry about losing their job. Believe it or not, many Chinese are nostalgic of their "iron rice bowls" (an idiom coined for permanent, state jobs) that have been shattered in the three decades of market reform and economic development.

Who could have guessed that nearly 700 Chinese workers would lose their jobs overnight in auto molder Progressive Moulded Products Ltd.'s recent layoff?

One-third of the 2,000 workers at the Concord, Ontario, factory were of Chinese descent, Chinese newspaper Ming Pao reported.

Since the factory didn't have a union, workers joined forces with representatives from the Canadian Auto Workers and held negotiations with the owner, who has agreed to pay wages up to June 2008 and health insurance until the end of July. Progressive also said it will give each laid-off worker C$1,500.

"It's difficult to find a job in Canada. Now the factory is closing, where can I get the money to pay bills and support my kid?" Ming Pao quoted one of the former workers, identified as Ms. Zhang, as saying.

Maybe the Indian plastics processors who fasted July 7 in Chennai could find a more healthy way to communicate with the government.

The dawn to dusk fast was to press the Indian government to provide better support for thousands of local plastics enterprises, including uninterrupted power supply.

"Entrepreneurs have been facing severe hardship, particularly in Mettupalayam indutrial estate for some time now due to frequent power cuts," S. Rajaganapathy, president of the Plastic Traders and Manufacturers Association said in a release, according to The Hindu.

It's unclear how many people participated in the fast. But the firms also hope to get reduced duty on imported raw materials -- 5 percent customs duty and 4 percent additional import duty.

China's restrictive policies on plastic bags are getting more complex as the government rushes to patch loopholes of the initial rules.

The Ministry of Commerce issued new provisions in the beginning of July and restated the ban on free plastic bags to all retail stores.

Some Chinese media cited industry experts as saying that the new provision extends the ban from "supermarkets, department stores and farmers' markets," which were specifically mentioned in the original rules, to other, more controversial places such as restaurants, bookstores, clothing stores, drugstores, building-material stores, etc.

Such coverage has spread widely into both Chinese and foreign media, leading more retailers to jump on the bag-at-a-charge bandwagon.

However, Beijing officials clarified last week that restaurants are "by principle not included in the ban for this moment." Meantime, the same officials acknowledged that some restaurants are already charging for carry-out bags, but that's "their own practice and not mandatory."

The supplementary provisions also said produce bags, exempt from the ban, must have no carrier features. But again, contrary to some Chinese and foreign media coverage, the government has not banned customers from using produce bags as a substitute for shopping bags.

When asked about the regulatory issues of medical devices in Asia, a European speaker at Engel's recent Medical Days event in York, Pennsylvania, said outright that he has no interest whatsoever in Asia. He told the audience that North America and Europe are leading the market, and Asian firms will only later "copy products and do their own things."

He represented a German supplier of automation equipment used in high-end medical molding. That could be a reason for his lack of interest in Asia, since Asia mostly produces commodity medical products.

But that same reason translates to great opportunities for Western medical molders. Asia, including developed regions such as Japan and South Korea and developing countries like China and India, demands state-of-the-art medical devices.

A recent Medical Design article discussed the opportunities and challenges for entering the Chinese market.

To get started, take this piece of advice from the U.S. embassy in Beijing: "We encourage U.S. firms to participate in CMEF (China Medical Equipment Fair)." The embassy advises companies interested in exporting to visit www.export.gov.

An effective strategy for entering the Asian medical device market is to track down diseases to find niche markets. Japan suffers a lot of neurological disorders, and heart disease is rapidly growing in India, for example.

On the regulatory aspect, the article said, a roadblock to marketing products in China is the stringent product registration process, which usually takes about a year or more, depending on the type of product. But that's true for all foreign markets. If anything, the Chinese standards are lower than the Western ones.

Rising prices of food, energy and commodity materials across the globe are stretching consumer confidence thin. Auto sales in the U.S. dove more than 17 percent in the first half of 2008. Sales of new vehicles also dipped 2 percent in Japan during the same period. But growth remains brisk in China, topping 18 percent in the first 6 months.

But the pace of growth is slowing down slightly, compared to the 22 percent rate in the first half of 2007. Xinhua also reported that growth fluctuates vastly, as shown by monthly performances. Sales reached a record high in January but took a hard hit in February due to the Chinese New Year holiday and snow storms. March saw a beautiful rebound, but April was a month of adjustment. Sales in May declined again, impacted by the Wenchuan earthquake. The market finally regained growth momentum in June.

The Beijing Olympics, just two weeks away, is counting on Coca-Cola and a local company to "greenly" handle all of the plastic beverage bottles left in its sports venues.

Coca-Cola (China) said in a release that the company will join forces with Beijing Incom Resources Recovery Co. to recycle the PET bottles consumed during the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.

Incom claims to be the world's largest plastics recycling facility. It started operation last August and is capable of processing 60,000 metric tons of waste annually.

This is probably going to be the most well-known wood-plastic composite structure in China: an artistically-designed 100-meter-long outdoor bench in the Olympics Metro Park in Beijing. Click here to view photos.

Tetra Pak, the patron, will gain name recognition by masses of visitors to the park, whose numbers are projected to be between 140,000 and 270,000 each day, during the Beijing Olympic Games.

More than 129,000 used Tetra Pak containers went into the composite materials that formed the sitting panels of the bench, People's Daily said.

In 2007, 13,000 metric tons of Tetra Pak packaging was recycled in China, according to the Swiss company.

Maybe I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, maybe it's just a numbers game, but Shanghai's gross domestic product growth rate of 10.3 percent in the first half of 2008 is below China's national average of 10.4 percent.

Yes, the discrepancy is small. Yes, maybe other regions inflated their numbers.

But, Shanghai has, since 1992, maintained double-digit annual growth rates, which were always higher than nationalwide averages, financial magazine Caijing pointed out.

During the first six months, the securities industry made zero no contribution to Shanghai's GDP growth, and the real estate industry dragged the overall growth, the Caijing article also said.

Figures from the Shanghai government show a decline of investment in city infrastructure and industrial projects.

Where is Shanghai headed? Should we pull out of that market?

Not yet. On the flip side, Shanghai's export growth rate is still climbing, thanks to aggressive expansion into markets outside of North America and Europe -- Japan, Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa. The strategy of global diversification may spare China from being hit hard by the economic downturns in the West.

It takes some imagination to connect the dots between the Beijing Olympic Games, a plastics factory in Guangzhou, an explosion and a Uighur separatist group called the Turkestan Islamic Party.

But the Turkestan group made such a linkage by claiming responsibility for four recent explosions in China in an online video statement transcribed by the Washington-based IntelCenter. The group threatened to target the Beijing Olympics scheduled to open next week.

One of the four terrorist attacks claimed by the group was "a July 17 explosion in a plastics factory in Guangzhou." However, Guangzhou police refuted the claim and said they had no record of such explosion in Guangzhou on the particular day.

Chinese public security officials denied the claims and said the other three explosions -- May 5 in Shanghai, July 21 in Kunming, Yunnan province, and May 17 in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province -- had no connections with terrorist activities, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

Chinese and foreign media have pointed out the poor production quality and the factual errors in the narratives. The Wenzhou incident was referred to with a wrong date. The video also mentioned "the eight Olympics cities in China," while in fact there are only seven such cities.

An official with the Guangdong Plastic Industry Association in Guangzhou told Plastics News Asia Bureau Chief Steve Toloken on July 28 that they were not familiar with any bombing or terrorist activity in local factories.

There was speculation in some media, including the Washington Post, that the Turkestan group may have been referring to a March 13 explosion at a Guangzhou vehicle repair facility and residential building that killed seven people. According to local media reports, that explosion occurred during an accident involving a truck delivering a large load of plastic caps or discs used in toy guns.

A Chinese vegetable vendor also claimed responsibility for the Kunming explosion via the online forums, who later admitted to the police that he made up the story to gain attention.

While denying the Turkestan group's claims, the Chinese government also is reinforcing security measures at Olympic venues and other public space in a number of major cities, according to various local media.

For polyurethane professionals and managers in Asia, UTECH Asia 2008 will once again incorporate PU China 2008, and it will all take place September 3-5 in Shanghai.

The biennial event attracted 7,654 visitors in 2006 and covered a variety of industries, including automotive, general engineering, aerospace, furnishing and bedding, building and construction, electrical/electrotechnical, footwear, textile, mining and medical/surgical applications.

Plastics News' sister publication Urethanes Technology International is a co-organizer of the event.

More information is available at www.utechasiapuchina.com.

Taiwanese computer manufacturer Asus is making headlines these days. In addition to its popular EeePC-branded ultraportable laptops and the "world's slimmest" 22-inch monitor it's rolling out, the company debuted its first series of fragrant laptops last week in Beijing.

The F6V series offers four different scents, including an "ocean-inspired water scent" and a "Chinese herbal ointment scent."

The company's design director Fu Huixin explained the technology to portal Web site 163.com: "We use nanotechnology to form resin and soak the resin in perfume compound, which becomes fragrant resin in about 24 hours. We then coat the material on the surface [of the casing]."

The company said the development process took about a year, but it wasn't able to comment on how long the scent will last. "We'll have the answer after some more testing," Fu said.

It's unclear whether these fragrant computers will be available for the U.S. consumers. But if they plan to do so, I'm not sure how the "Chinese herbal ointment" will work out in America. Perhaps replace it with a rich chocolate scent?

Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based chemical maker Albemarle Corp. is helping the Sichuan Fire Research Institute (SCFRI) to restore work by housing SCFRI's research projects at the company's technical center in Nanjing, Jiangsu province.

Several buildings at SCFRI collapsed or were seriously damaged during the May earthquake, and some testing equipment was ruined, a news release said.

Albemarle's Nanjing technical center is an official Flame Retardant Products Test Center certified by Beijing-based China Plastics Processing Industry Association. The center is providing SCFRI with testing and research support. This way, "the issuing of flame retardant certification labels will not be affected by the damage caused to the institute," the company said.

With a whopping 253 million Internet users, China has surpassed the United States to become the world's largest Internet user base.

The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) released that number last week and noted that more than 80 percent of Chinese Web surfers use broadband, according to Xinhua News Agency.

The United States had an estimated 223.1 million Internet users in June, the Associated Press said, quoting Nielsen Online's data.

A July report from the Boston Consulting Group spoke highly of the quality of China's online population, which spends more time online than their American counterparts and is quicker to adopt new technologies.

"Many people in the West think that China is still early in its digital development. In fact, in many activities such as instant messaging and blogging, China is more advanced than the United States and other Western economies," Xinhua quoted Christoph Nettesheim, a senior partner and managing director in BCG's Beijing office as saying.