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Toshiba Machine Splits from Parent Company If any owners or potential buyers of Toshiba injection molding machines have been concerned by recent grim headlines from Japan, they apparently need not worry. On March 3, Toshiba Machine Co., Ltd. of Japan (U.S. office in Elk Grove Village, Ill.) bought back 18.1% of the 20.1% of total shares of its stock owned by Toshiba Corp., the previous parent company and top shareholder. "As a result, they are no longer our top shareholder and we no longer belong to the Toshiba Group," said Toshiba Machine chairman and CEO Yukio Imura. This announcement was made in response to speculation about Toshiba Machine's financial soundness following reports that Toshiba Corp. had taken a loss of $6 billion in consequence of the bankruptcy of its Westinghouse Electric subsidiary in the U.S. West- inghouse foundered because of the drastic slowdown in U.S. construction of nuclear power plants. This has left the Toshiba parent company on shaky financial ground, according to reports in the business press. According to Imura, the separa- tion from the parent company has been seamless, with no impact on its operations, customers, shareholders, employees, or business partners. Also substantiated is the value of Toshiba Machine's stock, which is currently about even with 2014, one of the company's best years. 888-593-1616 • toshiba-machine.com Farrel Pomini Shows Off New HQ For Continuous Compounding Business Continous compounding equipment supplier Farrel Pomini now occupies a handsome new headquarters and assembly plant in Ansonia, Conn. Although the official ribbon cutting was last month, the firm's 86 employees actually moved into the 60,000- ft² facility last September. More than 50 visitors were given a tour of the new headquar- ters for Continuous Mixers and Compact Processors. It incorpo- rates offices, machine assembly, spare-parts stocking, rotor repair and refurbishment, and a processing laboratory and customer demonstration area with a CP550 Compact Processor equipped with automated upstream materials handling and downstream pelletizing, plus the new CPeX lab-sized Compact Processor that was introduced at K 2016. There's also an R&D; department with a 3D printer for prototyping scaled-down rotors and other machine components, and an automation laboratory for designing and testing control systems for compounding process lines. The company supplies continuous compounding systems primarily for flexible PVC, polyolefins, and TPEs. According to Paul Lloyd, business unit director, a promising new area of opportunity is biopolymers such as PLA, which require gentle handling due to their heat and shear sensitivity. The Compact Processor is well suited to PLA, says Lloyd, because its short 6:1 L/D minimizes heat history and its design separates mixing and pressurizing functions, so mixing can be optimized while still providing a shorter residence time than a twin-screw extruder. (More at short.ptonline.com/FP.) 203-736-5500 • farrel-pomini.com Scientists claim that a caterpillar commercially bred for fishing bait has the ability to biodegrade polyethyl- ene. Called wax worms, the larvae of the common insect Galleria mellonella, or greater wax moth, live as parasites in honeybee colonies. Wax moths lay their eggs inside beehives, where the worms hatch and grow on beeswax— whence they get their name. A chance discovery occurred when one of the scientific team, Federica Bertocchini, an amateur beekeeper, was removing the parasitic pests from the honeycombs in her hives. The worms were temporarily kept in a typi- cal plastic shopping bag that became riddled with holes. Bertocchini, from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), collaborated with colleagues Paolo Bombelli and Christopher Howe at the University of Cambridge's Dept. of Biochemistry in the U.K. to conduct a timed experiment. Around 100 wax worms were exposed to a plastic bag from a supermarket. Holes started to appear after just 40 min, and after 12 hr there was a reduction in plastic mass of 92 mg from the bag. Scientists say that the degradation rate is extremely fast compared with other recent discover- ies, such as bacteria reported last year to biodegrade some plastics at a rate of just 0.13 mg a day. "If a single enzyme is responsible for this chemical process, its reproduction on a large scale should be achievable," stated Bombelli, co-author of the study published last month in the journal Current Biology. "This discovery could be an important tool for helping to get rid of the polyethylene plastic waste accu- mulated in landfill sites and oceans." The beeswax on which wax worms feed is composed of a diverse mixture of fats, oils and some hormones. The researchers say it is likely that digest- ing beeswax and polyethylene involve breaking similar types of chemical bonds. "Wax is a polymer, a sort of 'natural plastic,' and has a chemical structure not dissimilar to polyethyl- ene," said Bertocchini. Spectroscopic analysis showed that the worms transform the polyethyl- ene into ethylene glycol. "We showed that the polymer chains in polyeth- ylene are actually broken by the wax worms," said Bombelli. "The caterpillar produces something that breaks the chemical bond, perhaps in its salivary glands or a symbiotic bacteria in its gut. The next steps for us will be to try and identify the molecular processes in this reaction and see if we can isolate the enzyme responsible." Plastic-Eating Caterpillar Could Halt PE Bag Waste 10 JUNE 2017 Plastics Technology PTonline.com T E C H N O L O G Y A N D I N D U S T R Y N E W S St ar t ing Up