After instructing an U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) 10-hr Industrial Safety course at the 2016 Ceramics Expo in Cleveland, Ohio, I was invited by Edgar Lara-Curzio of Oak Ridge National Laboratory to participate in the “Best Practices in Academic Laboratory Safety” symposium at the 2017 Material Science & Technology (MS&T;) meeting in Pittsburgh, Pa.

Members of the glass recycling supply chain, along with local and state agency partners, are critical components to set up and facilitate many community and state glass recycling programs. Partnerships in the recycling arena are not necessarily limited to funding or capital investment for equipment or infrastructure, and often focus on recyclable materials purchasing agreements, as well as steady end markets for glass recyclables.

When most people think about sustainability in manufacturing, they think “green”—as in using less energy per unit of output, using materials that are more environmentally friendly, generating less waste, etc. These are all worthy components of sustainable manufacturing, aimed at reducing the consumption of limited resources so that our businesses can continue to grow today and prosper tomorrow.

The main purpose of the U.S. Constitution was to establish the basic rights of all American citizens and provide direction on how the government should work. During the colonial era, intellectual property (IP) in America was actually owned by Great Britain.

SGCDpro Washington Liaison Walt Sanders attended a December 2016 meeting of the National Association of Manufacturers’ Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) Coalition. He assembled the following notes on the meeting.

In celebration of America Recycles Day 2016, the Glass Recycling Coalition (GRC) launched its website, www.glassrecycles.org. The GRC also kicked off the first in a series of webinars targeting a variety of topics—adding another resource to support making glass recycling work.

On January 31, 2011, the White House announced the launch of the Startup America initiative and noted that the Department of Commerce was “finalizing a plan to allow entrepreneurs to request faster review of their patents, an initiative that should lower patent pendency times overall and speed the deployment of new ideas to the marketplace.

From 2008 to 2012, the percentage of examiner interviews conducted for U.S. patent applications nearly doubled from about 15 to 30%. In 2012, 90% of applications in which examiner interviews were conducted were allowed, compared to a 61% allowance rate for patents in which no interviews were conducted. These trends have continued.

The Glass Packaging Institute (GPI), along with beverage leaders—including Diageo and New Belgium Brewing—and the glass processing and recycling industries, have gathered a dynamic group of organizations to advance glass recycling in the U.S. Called the U.S. Glass Recycling Coalition, the nearly two dozen member organizations will aim to make glass recycling a successful industry, as well as the efficient, high-quality, and convenient service consumers want and expect.