From Pillar to Post
When it opened last fall, much of the marvel about Uponor North America's new manufacturing plant for cross-linked polyethylene (PEX) pipe focused on how the 237,000-square-foot facility came on line with 40 new jobs six months ahead of schedule.
I'm sure some architectural and design professionals are recoiling in horror picturing our homestead with two structures bearing "hideous" siding seams and J-channels.
The whistleblower case that has been slowly unfolding against JM Eagle, the largest plastic pipe extruder in North America, took somewhat of a surprising turn Nov. 14 when jurors deadlocked and a mistrial was declared in the second phase of litigation.
Four of seven tiny houses in a Detroit neighborhood, set aside for for low-income individuals in need of affordable housing, have vinyl siding. All of them use plastics in some way. Other building material donations are being sought for future homes.
Artist Bill Frymire used a unique medium to create his latest masterpiece: Fashioning the face and long hair of Boston Celtics player Kelly Olynyk, famous for his 3-point shot accuracy, out of scraps of vinyl siding from local construction sites.
The Vinyl Siding Institute is embarking on an aesthetics overhaul with help from noted urbanist architects Steve Mouzon and Andres Duany. Surely it's needed with Mouzon saying that “vinyl siding is easy to trash because it has been heretofore hideous and obvious.”
Why won't city and state officials at least set up a committee to study the case for using some of the millions of dollars' worth of free polyethylene service lines that Los Angeles-based JM Eagle CEO Walter Wang is ready to ship? PE is the No. 1 pipe material in Europe (and the only pipe material installed in England) because it is durable, economical and flexible enough for trenchless installation.
“I think this work will launch a thousand science fair projects," said Craig Criddle when he discussed his study of mealworms and EPS. He was right.
Never has a building material seemed so beautiful to me as the white plastic wrap around an old house in southwest Detroit.
At the 2013 International Builders Show in Las Vegas, Lubrizol Corp. launched a mobile app that has a compatible product finder for its chlorinated PVC (CPVC), which is the subject of a lawsuit that could have costly ramifications for it and a host of companies that used the resin to make fire sprinkler pipes supplied to condo development around the United States.
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