Kickstart: Have the time of your life recycling with Plastic Swayze

Would you recycle more if you knew you were turning over your dirty HDPE bottles over to Plastic Swayze? Would Cans Solo shred first? And you just know Dolly Carton is out there sorting nine to five.

Merthyr Tydfil, a town near Cardiff, Wales, in the United Kingdom, invited its nearly 50,000 residents to name its new fleet of recycling vehicles. (The town's name is pronounced Mur-thah Tid-vil, by the way. And yes I had to look that up.)

"It's more important than ever to encourage and support our communities to recycle and the competition has not only raised awareness of this priority but brought an element of fun to it," Judith Jones, director of Merthyr Tydfil's Neighbourhood Services, said.

The County Burough Council said in a news release that it received hundreds of entries and picked 16 winners. Those winners were invited to visit a recycling facility to see the trucks they named.

The final selections: Eco Evan, Poteli, Plastic Swayze, Bio "Dai" Gradable; Georgie Cardboardie; Lori Ailghychu, Cans Solo, Rosie Recycle, Redusa, Tin Kardashian, Dolly Carton, Shred Sheeran, Bin Crosby, Laura ASHley, Adam Salvage and Greta "Bin" Burg.

While the United Nations Environment Programme's talks on a global plastics treaty continues in Canada, the European Parliament voted April 24 476-129 in favor of adopting requirements for more sustainable packaging and a reduction of packaging waste in the European Union.

The rules, our sister paper Sustainable Plastics writes, call for a 5 percent reduction in packaging by 2030, 10 percent by 2035 and 15 percent by 2040.

All packaging — with a few exceptions — will have to be recyclable while single-use plastic and metal beverage containers of up to 3 liters will fall under a deposit program to ensure collection targets are met.

There are other provisions requiring reuse and refill systems for most non-alcoholic beverages, limits on oversized boxes used to ship bulk and e-commerce products and limits on very thin plastic bags.

"For the first time in an environmental law, the EU is setting targets to reduce packaging, regardless of the material used," said Frédérique Ries, a parliament member from Belgium.

The fourth edition of Ashford's Dictionary of Industrial Chemicals is now available as a free digital download, all 11,000 pages of it.

The dictionary "is intended for anyone who uses or has an interest in industrial chemicals," and covers resins, solvents, curing agents, additives, intermediates and a range of other end uses.

I'm not the intended audience for this dictionary (my eyes glazed over on the first entry) but I can appreciate the wealth of information that's easy to access. The PDF version is searchable by chemical names and formulas and each entry covers its uses.

Industrialchemistry.org, has the link to download the full PDF.