Kickstart: Infrastructure, batteries and US-made separator film

Lithium-ion battery separator maker Entek International, part of Lebanon, Ore.-based Entek Manufacturing Inc., is one of 20 companies in 12 states that will receive part of $2.8 billion in federal grants to scale up the U.S. commercial-scale battery production facilities.

Entek Manufacturing President Kim Medford was part of an Oct. 19 announcement with President Joe Biden and Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm announcing plans for the investments, part of the first set of projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law approved earlier this year.

"We've all experienced supply chain disappointment in the last couple of years driven by foreign imports," Medford said during the event. "Investments in trusted U.S. supply just simply mitigates these risks."

Entek has been making separators — which provide insulation within the battery cell — since 2001 but had to compete against Chinese companies that receive funding that undercut market prices, Medford said. The company currently is planning sites for two new separator manufacturing plants in the U.S., where it says it can supply enough material for 1.4 million electric vehicles.

Entek makes multilayer separator films with biaxially oriented ultrahigh-molecular-weight polyethylene.

Congratulations! You've made it through K 2022.

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Messe Düsseldorf announced the schedule for the next K, which takes place every three years, Oct. 8-15, 2025, during a closing press conference for the 2022 show.

The dates are slightly earlier than traditional, but that has to do with the logistics needed to accommodate such a large event with so much equipment that needs to be moved in and set up, officials told Editor Don Loepp.

As expected, attendance was down for the first big international show since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, but company leaders indicated there was strong participation by key customers.

"We had a very, very intense trade fair," said Ulrich Reifenhäuser, chairman of the exhibitor advisory board, at the fair's closing news conference. "The only thing for me to do is grin."

A little plastic pipe, a clear plastic dome and some plastic sheet all came to play — or rather they made up a playground — for a viral YouTube video for the "Backyard Squirrelympics 3.0," the last in what its creator says is a series of tests for neighborhood squirrels.

Mark Rober has been making and assembling various obstacles in his backyard, then filming squirrels as they jump and run over and through them, a project that began two years ago with an attempt to create a bird feeder squirrels couldn't access.

He didn't deter the squirrels, but his original video has been viewed 105 million times. The 3.0 version, released Oct. 24, has 8.5 million views so far.

Like the first video, Rober's contraptions use plastic to prompt the squirrels to make higher jumps while still being visible to the many cameras hidden in the yard. Unlike that first video, however, Rober is admitting defeat in his original task.

"Much to the utter dismay of both me and the birds, they're still just eating all my birdseed with impunity," he says on the new video, "because they know they've won and there's nothing I can do to stop them."