
And so we wait.
"If China customs found a syringe, even if it's just one, in a bale of plastic, it's considered medical waste and the whole shipment would get rejected," he said. "And in paper, if they see too much plastic in the paper, also that could actually trigger a rejection in customs as well."A syringe is medical waste and has no business at all being in a plastic waste stream. Ever. The US would handle it that pile of plastic the same way, so for the Chinese to do so is also to be expected. I certainly wouldn't want to work with plastic contaminated with medical waste regardless of where ever in the world I was. And the same goes for plastic contaminating paper. That would gunk up any paper recycling plant in the US and the Chinese are not magically better than us in dealing with that waste.
"...Enzymoplast, which the firm says consists of proteins and enzymes that break down polyethylene "in a natural way". Enzymoplast triggers a decomposition process when plastic bags containing the additive come into contact with microorganisms. The microorganisms first devour the proteins, which breaks the polymer chain. It also activates the enzymes, which act as a catalyst and accelerate the process. After a few months only water and CO2 remain..."
"________ will prove the worst, most insidious invention of humanity. ________ kill everything and anything in their path on all four corners of the planet. ________ kill without violence, without warning and without provocation. Of all of humanity’s folly on this green planet, ________ take the trophy for man’s inhumanity to all other life on Earth."Is it guns? Bombs? Nuclear weapons? Chemical weapons? Warfare in general? Global warming? Nope. None of the above. The author of that quote believes that plastics are worse than all of those.
"They give you no or little insight as to what underlying principals could be learned and used elsewhere - except to run another DOE. For instance, in a pressure-sensitive adhesive formulation DOE, you may see that adding more tackifier increases the tack. So marketing wants more tack? Then add more tackifier...until you suddenly see a decrease in tack. Now what?
The problem is that the underlying physics drive the results, not an artificial concept like tack. When you see that the tackifier is lowering the plateau modulus (hence more tack) but also increasing the Tg, you realize that you can overdo it. Raise the Tg too much and you have a tack-free material, plateau modulus be damned.
But a DOE will never educate you about this. It will only give directions based on what the inputs were. Garbage in, garbage out. There is a good reason you never see a DOE in Nature, JACS, or pretty much any scientific journal. You don't learn anything fundamental from them. And as soon as we give up our focus on the fundamentals, we are all done."