Kickstart: Polymers featured in automotive innovations

A few polymer-related innovations are among the finalists for the 28th annual Automotive News PACE Awards.

DuPont is a finalist for a high damping nylon 6/6 that helps to minimize audible noise from electric vehicle propulsion systems while still maintaining high stiffness.

The polymer represents an improvement over conventional glass-reinforced nylons with a double-digit percentage weight reduction compared with aluminum. The first customer for the material is General Motors.

Martinrea International is a finalist for its brake lines with GrapheneGuard, which provide weight savings and abrasion protection. According to the entry, the material eliminates the need for extra protective layers on standard nylon-coated brake lines.

When used in place of traditional nylon and coextruded polypropylene layers, GrapheneGuard can provide weight savings of as much as 25 percent while also demonstrating superior abrasion protection, improved strength and better chemical resistance. The first customer is Ford Motor Co.

Winners of the PACE awards, which honor innovations by automotive suppliers that have been commercialized, will be announced Sept. 19 in Detroit.

Plastics News readers have been seeing a lot of headlines about chemical recycling for the past few years. Resin suppliers are touting the technology as a way to recover hard-to-recycle products like film, pouches, multilayer and contaminated streams. When it works, the end product can be a feedstock capable of being used to make virgin resins.

Sound like a magic bullet? Well, there's controversy. And over the weekend, Inside Climate News weighed in with an in-depth report on Brightmark Energy's new pyrolysis plant in Ashley, Ind.

"Brightmark faces ongoing economic, political and — environmental critics and some scientists say — technical headwinds" to get the plant up and running, according to the report.

With other chemical recycling plants on the drawing boards around the world, the plastics industry — and its critics — will be watching closely to see if Brightmark is successful.

Chemical recycling in the rubber industry will be one of the topics I want to learn more about this week at the International Tire Exhibition and Conference (ITEC) in Akron, Ohio.

ITEC, organized and presented by our sister publication Rubber News, is the largest tire manufacturing trade expo and conference in North America. The agenda features more than 50 presentations from experts across the industry.

Ellis Jones, Goodyear's vice president and chief sustainability officer, will focus on the sustainable future of the industry in a keynote address today.

And speaking of chemical recycling, Teijin Frontier Co. Ltd. will display a new eco-friendly tire cord made from chemically recycled polyester fiber.

According to the company, this is the world's first commercialization of a tire cord material that combines an resorcinol formaldehyde-free adhesive and a chemically recycled polyester fiber.

Teijin Frontier said it will start test production of the product in 2023, targeting annual production of 200 kilotonnes per year by 2030.