MD_Packaging Newsletter_: What can you do with recycled glass?

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August 26, 2011

It's back-to-school season! Even if you're not starting class, give your neurons a workout with our World's Smartest Design Engineer game. A new month starts soon with new prizes for top scorers, so sharpen your pencils and give it a try!

In addition to going back to school, we're going green in this quarter's packaging enewsletter. Check out:

What you can do with recycled glass
Robots that sort recycleables
And reusable bags made with steel

Don't forget to scroll down for new products, news from Machine Design, and industry updates. And let us know your thoughts at machinedesign.com, on our discussion forums, or by email.

Best of luck,
Jessica Shapiro

Articles

What can you do with recycled glass?

Most U. S. communities have recycling programs. So it should be easy to reuse common materials such as glass and plastic, right? Not quite, at least when it comes to glass. A recent industry report claims that 40% of glass chucked into recycling bins ends up in landfills. But experts say that almost all glass is recyclable, so why does so much of it just get added to the waste pile?

Glass recycling is mostly a free-for-all because there is no uniform definition of recycling and no meaningful way to track of discarded glass. Some might be surprised by uses for reclaimed glass.
Read the full article.

A robot that recycles

In the European Union, there’s a ban on using workers to sort refuse for recyclables. To help recycling efforts and waste-management tasks, engineers at ZenRobotics in Finland are developing a robotic arm and gripper from off-the-shelf components. The robot will use a variety of sensors to identify useful and dangerous material passing by on a conveyor and treat them accordingly. Currently, the robot can pick up and recognize certain types of plastics, metals, concrete, and wood.
Read the full article.

Voila! A folding steel grocery bag

Some engineers are trained in the art of building things out of folding sheets of paper and metal into useful objects (origami). One design that came from this training was a solar panel that folds up for transport and then unfolds once it is in orbit. Now, two engineers from the Royal Society have developed an origami-based method of making a collapsible grocery bag. It is loosely based on a five-year-old design from a mathematician from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That design’s major flaw was that it needed a material with zero thickness. The new design, on the other hand, starts with a large piece of plastic with steel plates glued to it. Folds and creases are made where the steel plates meet. Thus, the flexible plastic holds the bag together despite being folded. The bag collapses down to a relatively thin, flat sheet. No word yet on how much the bag weighs or if designers plan on adding handles.
Read the full article.

New Products

Five-head leak detector

The five-head leak tester uses a servo-motor-driven flying-head design to test up to 250 2-L bottles/min. Heads travel with bottles along a conveyor in the enclosed system. The leak tester uses low-pressure air to detect holes as small as 0.006-in diameter, fallen bottles, choked necks, and blocked necks.
W. Amsler Equipment Co.

Indexable product-marking equipment

The Sprinter Model 88 Six-Band unit and the Sprinter Model 88 Date Code Band unit work with standard Sprinter 88 extended-head code-marking machines for customized package marking. They replace rubber-type characters inserted into rubber grooves with indexable bands of characters. Both models print in any orientation at 200 cycles/min with quick-drying pigmented inks.

The Six-Band unit has six bands operators can independently index to print characters in each of six positions. The standard unit comes with bands of numerals 0 to 9 (plus one blank) 5/32-in. high. Other character sizes are available as well as bands with letters and symbols. The Date-Code Band unit uses four bands to apply a month-day-year date code. The first band applies a three-character month (e.g. JAN); the second and third bands have numbers 0 through 0 to print the two-digit day (e.g. 03). The fourth band prints the two-digit year (e.g. 11 for 2011). Standard character height is 5/32 in. with other sizes available.
Sprinter Marking Inc.

Plastic pallet machine

The Lumina Pallateer #4 System (PM #4) fully automated production cell uses four molding cavities in a dual stacked mold configuration to produce 960,000 nestable, one-way, 48-in.-square pallets per year. The system's extruder melts up to 2,400 lb/hr. Other components include a top-entry stacking robot, blender, loaders, nitrogen-gas generator, mold-cooling-water chiller, and two aluminum molds with support beam. The machine's footprint is 14.5 m by 5 m.
Wilmington Machinery

News from MD

New white papers from HP and Intel:

Realistic User Productivity Comparisons for Upgrade Decision Making

AutoCAD® users can appreciate the rock-solid dependable performance they demand from HP and Intel® processor-based workstations. The Intel® Core™ and Xeon® processor-based workstation portfolio includes a wide range of machines that fit multiple user segments, from entry, mobile, essential, and digital workbench users.

Return on Innovation: Making Individuals More Productive

The value proposition for equipping technical and creative professionals has drastically changed. The unprecedented combination of economic pressure and technological advancement has rewritten the rules of how to do more with less. Teams may forego new hires or do the same work with fewer staff, yet they can avail themselves to new tools and techniques. The challenge then becomes how to equip these valuable and fewer number of professionals to be more productive and innovative.

Click here to register and download

Machine Design's WORLD'S SMARTEST DESIGN ENGINEER
The 2nd season has begun! Players from across the globe are still competing for fun, education, prizes and the ultimate bragging rights. Thanks to our sponsors for their support of the exciting online opportunity for engineers! Play Now!

Altech Corp.
Bimba Manufacturing Co.
Maxon Motors
R+W America
Simrit
Smalley Steel Ring

Also, please download our first World's Smartest Design Engineer Study Guide, provided by Maxon Precision Motors, Inc. Brush up on motion control basics and learn more to help you excel at the game.

ARCHIVED WEBCASTS AVAILABLE FOR FREE VIEWING
Click Here for a list of archived Machine Design webcasts.

Industry Update

Upcoming shows and conferences
Material Handling & Logistics, Sept. 18-21, 2011, Grand Summit Resort Hotel & Conference Center, Park City, Utah
The conference will offer over 60 sessions addressing supply-chain strategy, best practices, emerging technologies, and innovation. Formats include interactive technical workshops, keynote addresses, and classroom environments. Registration costs $700 or before Sept. 3, 2011 and $900 thereafter. Sessions, proceedings, receptions, meals, speakers, tours, and training sessions are included.
For more information, visit the show website.

Pack Expo, Sept. 26-28, 2011, Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas
The expo is expected to attract 1,600 suppliers and 25,000 packaging professionals and will feature machinery, software, and equipment demonstrations and industry-specific pavilions. Educational opportunities include panel discussions, seminars, technology briefings, and full-day conferences on subjects such as safety and security, sustainability, operational reliability, and simulation and modeling. Registration is $30 on or before Sept. 7 and $60 thereafter.
For more information, visit the show website.

2012 SPE International Polyolefins and FlexPackCon, Feb. 26-March 2, 2012, Hilton Houston North Hotel, Houston, Texas
The theme of the conference will be Global Advances in Plastics Engineering. The conference will include technical sessions on polyolefin technology and on flexible packaging, including sustainability, converting, film manufacturing, new packaging concepts, new materials, regulatory, lifecycle, recycling, and barrier layers. conference organizers have issued a call for papers. Abstracts are due Sept. 15, 2011 with papers due Nov. 15, presentations due Dec. 15, and student posters due Jan. 15, 2012. Submit abstracts for review and approval online.
For more information, visit the show website.

Fabrico expands label printing offerings

Fabrico, Kennesaw, Ga., announced the expansion of its label-printing services. Offerings now include pressure-sensitive labels, decals, nameplates, signage, striping and rating plates, warning and instruction labels, reflective films or strips, warranty labels, tamper-evident labels, ID and RFID tags and RFID, consecutively numbered or barcoded asset labels, serial-number labels, removable labels, single or multi-color labels, and thermal labels and ribbons. The company says its labels are durable, easy-to-read, machine readable, aesthetically pleasing for brand recognition, and capable of reducing liability.
For more information, visit Fabrico.