Kickstart: Art and plastics

The man who married plastics and art has died.

De Wain Valentine, who was so obsessed with finding the perfect resin to create his sculptures that he developed his own material, Valentine Maskast Resin No. 1300-17, died Feb. 20 at the age of 86.

As a child in Brooklyn in the 1940s, Valentine loved the potential of plexiglass and polyester so much that he attempted to cook resin in his parents' oven, according to ArtNews.com.

His desire to combine art and technology saw him work with the former Hastings Plastics Co. in Santa Monica, Calif., to develop materials that would flow into just the shapes and textures he imagined.

The Maskast Resin was a modified polyester resin developed so that he could cast colossal objects in a single pour.

Not that art studios and established artists understood his interest.

It took until 1964 to get an art gallery to give him a solo show, and a 1965 stint teaching art at UCLA got him fired, twice, for teaching students how to use plastics rather than paints.

His pieces Gray Column, standing 12 feet high, 8 feet wide and weighing in at 3,500 pounds, has been exhibited at The Getty Museum in California. The Getty has a 30-minute video from 2013 with Valentine talking about his history and the piece.

A construction project to allow more big cargo ships to dock in Boston has created a plastics pollution side effect elsewhere along the New England coastline.

Late last year, beach cleanups along Cape Cod began turning up segments of yellow plastic cords in large quantities.

"I've been doing beach cleanups for decades and I had never ever seen this stuff before, so I knew it had to be related to some situation that's new," Laura Ludwig, managing of the Center for Coastal Studies Marine Debris & Plastic Program, said in a release from CCS. "So, I started asking around to see if I could figure out what it was."

The answer turned out to be a low density polyethylene shock tubing used for blasting in rock quarries. Further research led CCS to the Army Corps of Engineers, who used it in project to make a deeper harbor in Boston that would allow larger container ships to use the port. While boats had been positioned to collect debris, they obviously missed a lot of the tubing.

The Corps and contractors working on the project are working closely with the environmental group to make sure it doesn't happen again and to help collect pieces. But Long notes that small pieces of tubing may wash up on Cape Cod beaches for years to come.

We've written a lot at Plastics News and our sister publications about changes expected in an auto industry where traditional internal combustion engines are expected to be replaced at some point by electric vehicles.

It's sometimes hard to picture just what parts that change will impact.

Our sister paper Automotive News has an interactive graphic on its website showing what will be lost. Overall, AN reports, about 100 parts now on standard engine vehicles will be dropped. That includes plastics-intensive fuel tanks along with transmissions, engine cooling systems and mufflers.

On their way in are 41 new parts — all of them electrical or electronic with no moving parts.