Kickstart: AI and new material development

Can artificial intelligence make smarter materials and create them faster?

Los Altos, Calif.-based Toyota Research Institute, part of Toyota Motor Corp., has launched a "multiyear, multimillion-dollar challenge" that will use advances in AI to speed the development of new materials for the real world.

Researchers already use AI in developing concepts for materials, but that work encounters a bottleneck in the laboratory when it comes to making a real material, TRI says. Toyota will use AI to determine not just if a new material is possible, but if it can be produced at a commercial scale.

"Accelerating the synthesis of computer-predicted materials could be a game changer in the development of advanced technologies such as EV batteries," said Brian Storey, TRI's senior director of energy and materials, in a news release. "We are inviting the best researchers in this field to bring fresh thinking to help close the gap between the computer and the lab."

The Synthesis Advanced Research Challenge will provide funding for the "most promising ideas" submitted.

TRI will accept submissions from university professors, national laboratory scientists and "early-career scientists are especially encouraged to apply."

Proposals are due by June 1.

A Thailand-based plastics maker will pay $20 million to the U.S. for 467 violations of U.S. sanctions on Iran.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) said in an April 19 announcement that SCG Plastics Co. Ltd. of Bangkok agreed to the settlement for violations of the OFAC sanctions between 2017 and 2018.

SCG "caused U.S. financial institutions to process $291 million in wire transfers" for the sale of high density polyethylene made in Iran by a joint venture with National Petrochemical Company of Iran.

"SCG Plastics employed certain shipping and documentation practices that obfuscated the product's Iranian origin and Iranian parties' involvement, which caused U.S. financial institutions to process these wire transfers in violation of OFAC's sanctions on Iran," the OFAC said in an April 19 statement.

Paperwork for the HDPE shipments listed the resin's origin as "Middle East," rather than Iran, to help hide the process, the government agency said, calling the violations "egregious."

This week's print issue of Plastics News includes our 2024 recyclers and brokers ranking and directory, and while some things may appear to be the same as past years, there's still a lot of changes if you dig down.

PN's data guru Hollee Keller writes in her blog that the 13.8 billion pounds of recycled material counted this year matches the number from 2023. But PN works to capture the amount of material sold to outside users, so some big companies that bump up their use of in-house materials could drop down in rankings. In fact, the No. 8 company from last year, Revolution Sustainable Materials LLC of Little Rock, Ark., now consumes all of its recyclate, so it dropped off the 2024 list.