Is it time to stop using glue and labels on paper?

6 hours ago

Adhesives (stickies) on paper packaging can make recycling ineffective by damaging machinery or causing batch rejection, even though paper is one of the most recycled materials in Europe.
New EU regulations (PPWR) require packaging to be 70% recyclable by 2030 and 80% by 2038, driving innovation to eliminate adhesives.
Three German firms—Fraunhofer, Hermann Ultraschall, and Henkel—are developing adhesive-free sealing technologies: laser sealing, ultrasonic sealing, and cold seal solutions for barrier-coated paper.
Challenges include the need to modify or replace existing machinery, slower production rates, limitations on paper types, and difficulty sealing food-grade packaging.
Henkel’s cold seal solution works with barrier-coated paper for heat-sensitive foods, while Fraunhofer’s laser sealing and Hermann Ultraschall’s ultrasonic welding aim for mass production within two years.
Experts note that poor collection and sorting methods are a bigger obstacle to paper recycling than adhesives, but new sealing technologies are a promising start for improving sustainability.

Scanning Herculaneum scrolls requires synchrotron X-ray micro-CT with careful tuning of voxel size, X-ray energy, and sample-detector distance to balance resolution and phase contrast.
Unwrapping involves surface localization, mesh tracing, and flattening; tools like GrowPatch, lasagna, and spiral fitting are used, but human correction is still needed for errors like holes, mergers, and sheet switches.
Ink recovery is challenging due to carbon ink on carbonized papyrus; models trained on fragments use pseudo-labeling and self-distillation, but generalization across scrolls remains a bottleneck.

Kitchen aluminum foil is remarkably thin (10 μm) with a high aspect ratio, making it suitable for forming metamaterials and having properties like being impermeable to oxygen and water when thick enough (25 μm or more).
It is highly reflective, conductive, corrosion-resistant, non-toxic, lightweight, and cheap (under 50¢/m²). Robert Lang's 'tissue foil' laminates tissue paper with foil for origami.
Aluminum foil is made from alloys like 1100 and 1200, with room-temperature yield strengths of 30–170 MPa, remaining ductile down to absolute zero and melting at almost 650°C, suitable for cryogenic and high-temperature applications.

Supply chain uncertainty in 2026 focuses on tightening PCB material supply, including copper-clad laminates, fiberglass fabrics, and epoxy resins, due to geopolitical factors, demand from emerging tech, regulations, and capacity constraints.
Shortages are driven by AI infrastructure consuming premium materials, electric vehicle expansion increasing demand, data center growth requiring sophisticated PCBs, environmental regulations affecting production, energy costs, and inventory hoarding.
Most affected materials include low-loss laminates, ultra-low-profile copper foil, heavy copper laminates, and high-frequency materials, impacting automotive, medical, aerospace, telecommunications, and consumer electronics industries.

Choosing boring technology reduces unknown unknowns and long-term maintenance burdens.
Technology maintenance costs are high, and legacy systems are difficult to replace.
Practices (e.g., test && commit || revert) are easier to adopt and abandon than technology.

Laser enrichment technology could reprocess uranium waste from a closed facility in Paducah, Kentucky, into usable nuclear fuel.
Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) is developing this technology, which could be more efficient than conventional centrifuge methods.
Geopolitical shifts, including reduced reliance on Russian uranium due to the Ukraine war, are boosting interest in new enrichment technologies.

Scanning Herculaneum scrolls requires synchrotron X-ray micro-CT with careful tuning of voxel size, X-ray energy, and sample-detector distance to balance resolution and phase contrast.
Unwrapping involves surface localization, mesh tracing, and flattening; tools like GrowPatch, lasagna, and spiral fitting are used, but human correction is still needed for errors like holes, mergers, and sheet switches.
Ink recovery is challenging due to carbon ink on carbonized papyrus; models trained on fragments use pseudo-labeling and self-distillation, but generalization across scrolls remains a bottleneck.

Kitchen aluminum foil is remarkably thin (10 μm) with a high aspect ratio, making it suitable for forming metamaterials and having properties like being impermeable to oxygen and water when thick enough (25 μm or more).
It is highly reflective, conductive, corrosion-resistant, non-toxic, lightweight, and cheap (under 50¢/m²). Robert Lang's 'tissue foil' laminates tissue paper with foil for origami.
Aluminum foil is made from alloys like 1100 and 1200, with room-temperature yield strengths of 30–170 MPa, remaining ductile down to absolute zero and melting at almost 650°C, suitable for cryogenic and high-temperature applications.

Supply chain uncertainty in 2026 focuses on tightening PCB material supply, including copper-clad laminates, fiberglass fabrics, and epoxy resins, due to geopolitical factors, demand from emerging tech, regulations, and capacity constraints.
Shortages are driven by AI infrastructure consuming premium materials, electric vehicle expansion increasing demand, data center growth requiring sophisticated PCBs, environmental regulations affecting production, energy costs, and inventory hoarding.
Most affected materials include low-loss laminates, ultra-low-profile copper foil, heavy copper laminates, and high-frequency materials, impacting automotive, medical, aerospace, telecommunications, and consumer electronics industries.

Choosing boring technology reduces unknown unknowns and long-term maintenance burdens.
Technology maintenance costs are high, and legacy systems are difficult to replace.
Practices (e.g., test && commit || revert) are easier to adopt and abandon than technology.

Laser enrichment technology could reprocess uranium waste from a closed facility in Paducah, Kentucky, into usable nuclear fuel.
Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) is developing this technology, which could be more efficient than conventional centrifuge methods.
Geopolitical shifts, including reduced reliance on Russian uranium due to the Ukraine war, are boosting interest in new enrichment technologies.

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