Kickstart: Swimming with sharks in plastic boxes

You may be a plastics industry supporter, but would you trust plastic against a shark?

It's Shark Week for cable television's Discovery channel, which means you can expect highlights from videos of sharks leaping out of the water, sharks chomping down on their prey and close calls between humans and sharks, including one from 2020 when diver Jimi Partington settled himself into a clear plastic box in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego in an area where there were reports of sharks feeding nearby. (Spoiler alert: There were definitely sharks feeding nearby.)

The encounter was filmed for the movie Great White Open Ocean, which was first shown during Discovery's 2022 Shark Week, but clips of the attack are making the rounds on social media promoting this year's event. It is also airing July 30 on Discovery. The encounter was to test a theory about shark behavior being affected by how close it is to shore.

I admit I haven't seen the original movie, so I'm not certain what possessed Partington to consider splashing around in a plastic box in a feeding zone, but in the film, the shark explores the underside of the box before smashing through it, nearly taking a bite out of Partington.

"I love all wildlife and I knew the risks involved," Partington says in a video clip of the attack on YouTube. "I chose to put myself in that position."

Pipe, profile and tubing extrusion week doesn't have the same heft as Shark Week, but that area of the plastics industry is seeing some big growth — especially pipes.

Hollee Keller, PN editorial research coordinator, writes in her blog about this week's PPT ranking that pipes make up 52 percent of the total PPT picture and the average sales per company area up 13.5 percent in the rankings for 2022. With pipe plants adding capacity and new locations, expect those numbers to go up.

PN reporter Catherine Kavanaugh reports on the impact of $55 billion in infrastructure spending in the U.S. thanks to the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, as well as increased pressure on plastic pipe from environmental activists.

Volkswagen is using its Knoxville, Tenn., site as a hub for material developments, with an eye toward using more composites in place of steel, lighter reinforced composites than existing options and potentially using cellulose-based reinforcements in interior thermoplastic parts.

The Volkswagen Innovation Hub is located at the University of Tennessee Research Park, where it can also work with UT researchers and specialists from the nearby Oak Ridge National Library, part of the U.S. Department of Energy.

The work is focused on lighter weight and more sustainable parts for future electric vehicles, VW officials said. That means functional, decorative, interior and exterior parts. VW and UT already developed a sheet molded compound lift gate based on the 2020 Volkswagen Atlas that was 13 pounds lighter than traditional materials, a 35 percent drop in weight that can be used in existing assembly plants.

A "paper-based materials" project would use cellulose reinforcement on interior parts, making them easier to recycle. The automaker says it is already looking at ways to bring those parts into full production.