Compounding

Coming to pharmacies this fall is a battery-operated ingestible pill that sends signals to a skin-mounted patch to indicate your response to medications, including heart rate, respiration and temperature.

Proteus Biomedical (Redwood City, CA) and Lloyds Pharmacy of the United Kingdom are launching Helius, a digital health product in the vanguard of a wireless revolution that will create an estimated $4 billion market in the healthcare field.

Mitsui Chemicals, Inc. and its affiliated Prime Polymer Co. (both Tokyo) are to boost capacity for polypropylene compounds in Thailand to meet growing demands of the automotive materials sector in the region.

Two new grades of polypropylene incorporating encapsulating starch particles will be released to the market by Cereplast, Inc. (El Segundo, CA) during the first half of 2012 in the United States and Europe.

Polymera Inc. (Hebron, OH) is commercially producing wood and natural fiber polymer composite compounds after initiating installation of equipment in February of last year, meeting its estimated timeframe to fully outfit its 160,000-sq-ft manufacturing facility in central Ohio with 60 million pounds of WPC compound capacity.

Sven Wolf was appointed as CEO of Leistritz Extrusionstechnik's executive board as of Nov. 15th. Wolf, together with Anton Fürst, now forms the new executive board of the Nuremberg-based extruder technology supplier. Wolf replaces Hubertus Schulte, who will leave the company at the end of  the year. Schulte was named CEO on Jan. 1, 2009, succeeding Günther Rduch, who was to remain at the company as a consultant through November 2009.

Songwon Industrial Group has acquired Additives Technology Greiz (ATG), a German maker of One Pack Systems (OPS) products, which combine several additives into an integrated dust-free pellet.

Teknor Apex has introduced a new melt-strength enhancer in masterbatch form that increases the pull force that can be applied to polylactic acid (PLA) by 300 to 500% over a wide range of drawdown ratios. As a result, higher throughputs in extrusion and thermoforming become possible, while scrap rates are reduced.

Below a snapshot of the week that was at PlasticsToday (11/28-12/2), with a few tasty tidbits picked from the smorgasbord of plastics we served up over the last five days.

Government regulations on lead and other hazardous substances in various electronic and electrical equipment are forcing medical device OEMs and others to find suitable substitutes for parts that have been manufactured from lead and other restricted materials, with plastics coming to the rescue.

Tough as they are, plastic products still are highly susceptible and vulnerable to nature's army of silent assassins: rodents, termites and subterranean insects. Plastic-jacketed wire and cable, pipelines, tubes, automotive parts and many other mission-critical applications can be destroyed by concentrated gnawing.