Modern-day plastics are versatile. They can be put to numerous uses, for example in admixtures for filling potholes in city streets. But did you know that they can also fill holes in newspapers, especially in summer when many people are on holiday and not much is happening?

A trick like this would be useless for Plasteurope.com, as we write about plastics every day. But a daily newspaper like “Financial Times Deutschland” (FTD, www.ftd.de) doesn’t have this problem. Its readers may not know that today’s cars are already pretty much made of plastic – not the “garden variety” that protects newsprint from moisture and mishandling but rather high-tech material to make fenders that can be bent back into shape or rear view mirrors that don’t shatter.

To make the hole-filling more interesting, FTD recently headlined a story “The car of the future is like a Trabi,” referring to the old East German “Trabant”, an object made of thermosetting plastics and a great deal of cardboard and more like a sewing machine than a car. It trotted out several experts to explain why everyone soon will be driving around in such little plastic tubs.

Industry “heavyweight” Wolfgang Hapke, president of PlasticsEurope Deutschland (Frankfurt / Germany; www.plasticseurope.org), explained to the FTD editors that plastics save vehicle weight and that automotive designers prefer “physical” parts rather than liquids or granules. Astonishing! To fill our next news hole, we may write that newspapers – and summer topics – can be easily recycled.