Thermal degradation and hydrolysis depolymerization of printing ink components for plastic packaging in recycling processes: a review

This review covers the decomposition mechanisms of various printing ink binder resins,with a particular focus on their behavior under extrusion conditions in the mechanical recycling process of polyolefin(PO)based plastic packaging.Thermal degradation and hydrolysis of the nitrocellulose(NC)-the most used binder for flexographic surface printing on single-layer flexible plastic packaging,occur concurrently during the mechanical recycling process under 160-210℃.For other printing ink binders,polyurethane(PU)noticeable degradation takes place between 200 and 300℃,mostly above 250℃.However,with the involvement of humidity,degradation by hydrolysis can start from 150℃.A similar effect is also discovered with the cellulose acetate(CA)derivatives,which are thermally stable until 300℃ and can be hydrolyzed at 100℃.The thermal stability of polyvinyl butyral(PVB)is not influenced by humidity,with thermal stability ranging from 170 to 260℃,depending on different types.Ultraviolet(UV)-cured acrylics are thermaliy stable until 400℃.The hydrolysis degradation can take place at room temperature.Moreover,this review covers the thermal stability of different colorants used for printing ink application and elaborates on several thermal-stable alternatives of some common colors.This study further reviews how the binder resin affects the quality of recyclates,revealing it to be not only induced by the degradation of the binder resin but also by the immiscibility between the plastic and binder resin.In advanced recycling processes,mainly selective dissolution-precipitation and pyrolysis,the presence of binder resin and its degradation products could stll affect the quality of the product.This review accentuates the imperative need for in-depth research to unravel the impact of printing ink constituents on the quality of recycled products.

BiDiBlast:Comparative Genomics Pipeline for the PC

Bi-directional BLAST is a simple approach to detect, annotate, and analyze candidate orthologous or paralogous sequences in a single go. This procedure is usually confined to the realm of customized Perl scripts, usually tuned for UNIX-like environments. Porting those scripts to other operating systems involves refactoring them, and also the installation of the Perl programming environment with the required libraries. To overcome these limitations, a data pipeline was implemented in Java. This application submits two batches of sequences to local versions of the NCBI BLAST tool, manages result lists, and refines both bi-directional and simple hits. GO Slim terms are attached to hits, several statistics are derived, and molecular evolution rates are estimated through PAML. The results are written to a set of delimited text tables intended for further analysis. The provided graphic user interface allows a friendly interaction with this application, which is documented and available to download at http：//moodle.fct.unl.pt/course/view.php？id=2079 or https：//sourceforge.net/projects/bidiblast/ under the GNU GPL license.

Land Allocation between Food and Energy

Many countries are promoting biofuels as a substitute for scarce oil. This paper develops a dynamic model of land allocation between food and energy and shows how the model can be calibrated using standard optimization techniques. Some possible implications of the trade-offs between food and energy are discussed. Specifically, we show that the effect of mandates is mainly felt through increased land conversion, which increases indirect carbon emissions Crude oil prices do not decrease significantly because of leakages.