Kickstart: Gluten that has nothing to do with a bake-off

Maybe I watch too many baking shows on TV, but when I come across the word "gluten," I don't expect it to be about plastics.

Among the many stories you'll find from the opening day of Fakuma 2021 in Friedrichshafen, Germany — where "corona guides" help masked visitors — correspondent David Vink writes about a project at KuZ, or Kunststoff-Zentrum in Leipzig, Germany, and Germany-based contract compounder Compraxx GmbH that is studying whether to use gluten to improve polylactic acid (PLA) molded products.

The "Gluplast" project involved wheat gluten as a naturally reoccurring additive in PLA to reduce inherent brittleness and improve low plastic deformability and impact strength. Currently, PLA is blended with traditional plastics to meet specific material requirements.

Using a natural element like gluten in flour to enhance a plastic made from bio-based feedstock seems like an apt combination to me.

And if you're interested in more news Fakuma, you can go directly to Plastics News' Fakuma page at www.plasticsnews.com/fakuma.

We've all heard of studies finding tiny or microscopic pieces of plastic on remote mountaintops, in the water we drink or fish we eat. It's not clear what it means for our health, but a congressional committee recently tried to unpack how government regulators should think about it.

An Oct. 6 hearing before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure looked at microplastics, fluorinated chemicals and other "contaminants of emerging concern," to use the scientific jargon.

They heard a lot of concerns, and calls from one witness to have the federal governments set national standards around microplastics in drinking water, as a California state agency is just beginning to do. The head of the subcommittee, California Democrat Grace Napolitano, promised to bring industry back for another hearing to talk more about it.

A multiyear agreement with pharmacy retailer Express Scripts Pharmacy will allow a Missouri company to double production of plastic prescription bottles and hire more visually impaired workers.

Kansas City-based Alphapointe first began making the bottles for Express Scripts in 2016, allowing it to hire 20 people who are blind. The new four-year agreement will provide enough business to add another four employees, the company said in a news release.

"Express Scripts Pharmacy clearly values the contributions of people with vision loss and this agreement means more good jobs for people who are blind," Alphapointe President and CEO Reinhard Mabry said.

Alphapointe has been in business since 1911 and says it is the third-largest employer of blind and visually impaired workers in the U.S. Its operations include injection molding, injection blow molding and injection stretch blow molding.

Alphapointe manufactures a number of different plastic bottles, including more than 50 million prescription bottles annually for the Department of Veterans Affairs.