Kickstart: The heat is on

While heat waves in Europe, North America and Asia are primarily focused now on the toll they are taking on lives, with more than 200 deaths blamed on heat in Europe alone, it also is disrupting an already fragile supply chain.

In the United Kingdom, airports closed as the highest heat recorded in the country, topping 40° Celsius (104° Fahrenheit), damaged runways and halted some rail service because of damage to tracks from the heat and fires spread through the U.K., Spain, France and Portugal.

In China, CNN reports that factories are being asked to shut down to preserve energy needed in homes and medical facilities.

Our sister paper Urethanes Technology International notes that Chinese-language media reported that "several major chemical-producing provinces," including urethane production sites in Hangzhou, Shaoxing and Haining, have received power restriction notices.

In the U.S., the Texas energy grid has managed at this point to withstand the demand from 110° F days through voluntary reductions in use. Twice so far in July, the state's power system operations, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, has issued appeals to residents and businesses to conserve power because of peak demand from the heat.

A Cleveland medical technology company hopes to bring a virus detection device to market with some help from Jabil Inc. in developing a manufacturable product.

IdentifySensors Biologics says it is partnering with Jabil to "develop processes for reliable robust manufacturing of portable devices that rapidly detect a wide range of infections at the molecular level with accuracy that is superior to PCR testing."

"Jabil has the experience and bandwidth to ensure this testing platform is manufactured efficiently and effectively with the highest-quality controls in the industry," IdentifySensors CEO Gregory Hummer said in a news release.

Jabil Healthcare, based in Clinton, Mass., is No. 7 in Plastics News' most recent ranking of North American injection molders with an estimated $830 million in sales in the region.

CBS Mornings set out to tell an uplifting story of how one New Jersey town upgraded its recycling system to add curbside collection of bags.

City workers from Red Bank cruise the town once a month for the special bag collection, as correspondent Meg Oliver reports.

A lot of what she covers in the six-minute report will be familiar to Plastics News readers: residents who have unknowingly put film in with their regular curbside recycling, problems with film at the materials recovery facility, comments from Jan Dell of the Last Beach Cleanup to emphasize problems with recycling labels and the unrecyclability of most items and Joshua Baca of the American Chemistry Council to rebut Dell's statements and support recycling programs.

But by the end of the report, Oliver notes that the carefully collected film is still at the MRF, waiting for a processor to collect and use it.

"We were a little disappointed," she noted. "We wanted to see this program go full circle from pickup to the processor, but as you saw, it's still sitting there."