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Japan's Asahi Kasei Chemicals (Tokyo) licensed its manufacturing technology for polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) resin to PTT Public Company Limited (PTT, Bangkok, Thailand).

"We're riding the wave," Sonny Morneault, national sales manager for Wittmann Battenfeld, told PlasticsToday.

When Adam Reiser and a partner founded a magazine nine years ago titled “Made In USA,” they wrote articles about companies making products in the USA. However, Reiser, who today is CEO and co-founder of Made In USA Certified (www.usa-c.com), found out that “people speak with forked tongue.” While they were telling Reiser that their products were being made in this country, in actuality they were shipping products in from China and relabeling them “Made in USA.”

It was bound to happen sooner or later. But this was probably not the opportune time to show the world that a real gun—a plastic gun—can be made using a 3D printer (additive manufacturing process). Leave it to those 20-somethings to come up with this.
   

Bayer MaterialSience announced today that is exiting the carbon nanotube business, an area where it once described itself as the industry leader.

Maxim Surgical (Richardson, TX), a recently established and privately owned designer and manufacturer of spinal implants, has received 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) for a cervical interbody fusion system made of machined polyetheretherketone (PEEK) rods.

The fusion system is hollow so that bone can grow through the device, fusing the adjacent bony surfaces of the vertebrae. The cervical spacer for the spinal fusion market is Maxim's first orthopedic implant.

Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation (Tokyo) has acquired the PVC compounding business of Comtrex, LLC (Warren, MI). This is the second such move made by the company following its offer to purchase the compounding business of the Tessenderlo Group (Brussels, Belgium).

Goya Foods Inc., the largest Hispanic-owned food company in the U.S., launched a redesign of its marinade product line, converting 12-oz (355-ml) and 24.5-oz (725-ml) products from glass to PET bottles from Amcor Rigid Plastics.

In a sign of the times, two different papers at ANTEC last month explored the potential of improving manufacturing processes for plastic scaffolds used in tissue engineering—the synthetic production of new human organs.

One paper looked at use of injection molding microcellular foam, or MuCell, and the other looked at thermally induced phase separation (TIPS) because of its value in producing highly porous scaffolds with interconnected structures.

The XL1 Super Efficient Vehicle from Volkswagen has gone into limited production at the automaker's Osnabrück plant in Germany with carbon fiber-reinforced plastic (CFRP) and aluminum dominating as materials of construction. The vehicles boasts fuel consumption of just 0.9 l/100 km (approx. 261 mpg US).