Kickstart: Preserving plastics

Plastics may last forever, but not in the condition conservators demand for museums and cultural displays.

Colors fade, resins degrade and binders break down.

So in 2020, the University of Cambridge Museums planned an in-person conference representing conservation methods used worldwide to share best practices on how to conserve art and other items of cultural importance.

But COVID-19 interfered with those plans and the event never took place. In 2023, however, the Leibniz Association of Research Museums in Germany reached out to organizers in Cambridge to recreate the content of the "Plastics in Peril: Focus on Conservation of Polymeric Materials in Cultural Heritage" in an online format.

Thirteen papers originally set to be presented at the May 2020 event have now been published, covering topics such as preserving flexible plastics in art installations, analyzing the materials used in robotic prototypes and even saving the soccer shoes of 1970s stars Pele and George Best. The Guardian has a story on the work by Kayleigh Spring and her team at Conservation and Museum Advisory Service — whose paper is part of the "Plastics in Peril" project — to save shoes whose polyurethane had degraded so badly they could barely be handled.

The increased use of plastics in everyday items means there's an increased chance those items, such as shoes, may want to be saved as a cultural artifact, Spring said. That means curators need to know how to handle plastics just as they would bronze, ceramic or wood.

"All of these plastics in our collections are getting older, and we're starting to see issues with them, so it's almost having to learn as we go along," Spring told The Guardian.

We may have entered a new year, but big public policy decisions that hovered over 2023 are continuing into 2024.

Plastics News' Steve Toloken writes that the General Services Administration, the group that oversees federal government spending, released a proposal Dec. 26 that calls for agencies to voluntarily reduce the amount of single-use plastics they purchase.

"The agency's plan appeared to leave all sides unsatisfied," Steve writes. "Industry organizations said GSA was unfairly targeting plastic and ignoring the negative impacts of other materials, while environmental groups said the agency's voluntary plan doesn't go nearly far enough."

You can find the full story here.

Silicon manufacturer Elkem ASA marked its 120th anniversary on Jan. 2, while the material at the base of its business prepares to mark an even bigger birthday.

The Oslo-based company began as "the Norwegian Stock Company for Electrochemical Industry," Elkem noted on its website. It currently has 7,300 employees and more than $4 billion in annual sales and is a key supplier to the electronics, medical and auto industries.

Silicon was first isolated 200 years ago by Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius, the company noted, marking this year its bicentennial.

Elkem added that about 3 grams of its silicon can be found inside most of the world's smartphones, in 2 million EVs and even on Mars as part of the batteries in the Perseverance rover.