I’m guessing emergency managers are looking intently for lessons they can draw from the Hurricane Helene-related flash flooding that claimed six lives at Impact Plastics on Sept. 27.
NBC News published a detailed story Oct. 18 looking at events at the Erwin, Tenn., factory the morning of the flood, including trying to reconstruct the situation faced by more than 10 people, including many Impact employees, who tried to escape the flood on a semitruck trailer before the rushing waters overturned it.
Some of the harrowing details track a lawsuit we wrote about, filed by the family of one employee who drowned in the flooding.
The story includes the goodbye messages from employees who later perished, as well as comments from those who were swept off the trailer but survived.
Like the lawsuit, the NBC article talked about the emergency alerts employees were getting on their cellphones that morning, as they worked in the injection molding plant. It noted that weather conditions were so bad the county hospital about a mile from the Impact plant had to have several dozen people airlifted from its roof in a dangerous rescue.
One Tennessee coalition of community, labor and faith groups said the disaster shows that workplace safety laws need to be updated to give workers more protection if they want to follow emergency weather notices.
Mercedes-Benz Group has opened what it says is the first electric vehicle battery recycling plant owned by a major carmaker — and plastics are part of it.
The auto manufacturer said in an Oct. 21 announcement that the facility in Kuppenheim, Germany, will recover 96 percent of battery materials.
“The mechanical process sorts and separates plastics, copper, aluminum and iron in a complex, multistage process,” it said.
The company also claims the hydrometallurgical recycling technology at Kuppenheim uses less energy than the pyrometallurgy process also used in Europe.
Mercedes-Benz Chairman Ola Källenius said it is “sending a strong signal of innovative strength for sustainable electric mobility and value creation in Germany and Europe.”
Get your creative and impactful injection molded plastic parts out there. The Society of Plastics Engineers is launching a new global award to highlight new products, those launched in the last 24 months, and in actual commercial production.
The group’s Injection Molding Performance Awards, or Impact, will debut at SPE’s next Antec annual technical conference, March 3-6, 2025 in Philadelphia.
