The global plastics industry converged in Orlando, Florida, in the first week of May for NPE 2024, the first edition of the largest plastics trade show in the Americas in six years. With over 50,000 attendees and 2,000 exhibitors, many sectors and types of companies were represented, from plastic resin manufacturers to injection molding equipment suppliers to plastics distributors and much more. A clear theme at NPE 2024 was sustainability – not only applying plastics to enable sustainable technologies like electric vehicles but also emerging technologies to make plastics themselves more ..read more

The Circular Innovation Council has made several new appointments. Katie Motta has been appointed circular procurement director. She leads the Circular Procurement portfolio, including Procure4Circular communities of practice, alongside training and advisory services. She previously led the award-winning Commercial Food Rescue and Waste Diversion pilot projects in Ontario and Alberta at CIC. Andrew Telfer has joined the team as Circular Innovation Launchpad (COIL) director. He brings 15-plus years of Canadian business sustainability and circularity experience with him. Telfer joins from the ..read more

New academic research released from Ghana shows that waste in the second hand clothes sector (SHC) is dramatically lower than has been previously claimed. The report released by the Ghana Used Clothing Dealers Association, showed that less than 5% of the second hand clothing imported into Ghana could be considered waste. The report is the first such academic study and proves that the second-hand clothing market in Ghana is a robust and sustainable ecosystem that contributes towards the global circular economy. Speaking on the report, Edward Atobrah Binkley, general secretary of ..read more

As part of Canadian Innovation Week 2024, federal minister of agriculture and agri-food Lawrence MacAulay announced Clean Works Inc. and Genecis Bioindustries Inc. as the two grand prize winners of the Novel Technologies Streams for the Food Waste Reduction Challenge. The Challenge, launched in November 2020 in partnership with Impact Canada, supports high-impact solutions to food waste in Canada. The Novel Technologies Streams focus on developing technological solutions to food waste. These solutions serve to extend the life of perishable food, or transform food waste into new products o ..read more

A new agreement between Ascend Elements and Call2Recycle will bring customized electric vehicle (EV) battery management, logistics and recycling services to automotive dealerships, recyclers, and repair facilities. The program combines Ascend Elements’s EV battery recycling infrastructure with the collection, logistics and tracking capabilities of Call2Recycle. The program offers online access to GreenTraxEV, the cloud-based platform from Call2Recycle designed to ship mid-life, end-of-life, and damaged-defective EV batteries. Working together, the companies aim to collect and recycle the equiv ..read more

Ukraine’s under-fire energy grid is getting support from a £1.9 million (C$3.2 million) UK-led project to build micro power plants fuelled by waste biomass to provide energy to local communities. Ukraine’s energy sector has been repeatedly targeted by Russian missile and drone attacks, with no thermal or hydro power plant left untouched. Many areas have been left without electricity and heating, leaving hospitals, businesses and households to rely on expensive diesel generators. Sergiі Dovgalyu of Concord Engineering Ukraine said: “Many residents in rural areas have no access to reliable energ ..read more

Algonquin College in Ottawa serves a diverse community of 19,000 students. Among its facilities, the Wolves Den stands out as one of Algonquin College Students’ Association’s premier full-service restaurants, renowned for its high-quality, house-made cuisine and full-service bar. Operating on weekdays from 11am to 6pm, the Wolves Den accommodates up to 180 guests. The restaurant has been using a biodigester since 2022. In the past 12 months, the LFC-200 biodigester processed 8500 kg of food waste from the Wolves Den, diverting over 36 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent from the atmospher ..read more

Lomi, a countertop food digester, which was invented in Kelowna, BC, has received approval from the Gold Standard Technical Advisory Committee for its new methodology, ‘Reduction in Methane Emissions from Landfills Through Decentralised Organic Waste Processing‘. Gold Standard was established in 2003 by the World Wide Fund for Nature and other international non-governmental organizations to ensure projects that reduced carbon emissions featured the highest environmental integrity levels and contributed to sustainable development. Gold Standard is known as the global benchmark for the highest i ..read more

Toyota Motor North America has entered a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory to investigate development of a direct recycling process for lithium-ion batteries, which are prevalent in new electric vehicles. The focus of the research will be on cathode chemistries made of nickel, manganese, and cobalt. “Having Argonne utilize our commercial battery products will help us evaluate the direct recycling process at an industrial scale, in addition to other battery recycling technologies to maintain a diverse portfoli ..read more

The Plastics Industry Association (PLASTICS) has announced the winners of its 2024 Plastic Sustainability Innovation Awards recognizing the outstanding innovations in plastics manufacturing that further environmental advantages in design, material, and end-of-life management. The Sustainability Innovation Award ceremony will take place at NPE2024 in Orlando, Fla. on May 8th. Sustainable Innovation in Design Award Eastman is the winner of the design award for their New Molecular Recycling Facility. Eastman’s new material-to-material molecular recycling facility in Tennessee is the largest in th ..read more