Plastic

A 3-D printing pen posted on Kickstarter has raised more than $1 million on the crowd-funding site after just a few days. After being posted Tuesday, 3Doodler, as the project is called, quickly shattered its goal of raising $30,000, and is now just shy of hitting the $1.2-million mark. The creators of 3Doodler claim that the project is the world's first 3-D printing pen. In a video pitching the project, the two show the device in action, creating small toys and bits of art, including an ostrich figurine.

In JJ Peet's beguiling L.A. debut at Redling Fine Art, the familiar tropes of found object assemblage sculpture - scrap wood and bricks, rags and plastic shopping bags - come to life through a sheer infusion of raw creative energy. In both the sculptures and the film that accompanies them, a genuine visual curiosity, paired with a judiciously democratic embrace of materials, result in works of unusual fervor and formal acuity. Upon entering the darkened front gallery at Redling, one encounters a trio of sculptures suspended from the ceiling by long, rectangular aluminum tubes.

Less than half of the 280 million metric tons of plastic produced each year ends up in the landfill.  A fair bit of the rest ends up littering the landscape, blown by the wind or washed down streams and rivers into the sea. So far Americans spend $520 million a year to clean up plastic litter washing up on West Coast beaches and shorelines. Efforts to clean up the oceans' enormous swirling gyres of garbage has an incalculable cost. Thus, much of the focus has been on how to stop the river of trash from entering the ocean.

At 62, Kathy Baker juggles a busy schedule on screens big and small, and stage. She plays part of a quartet in Joanna Murray-Smith's provocative comedy "The Gift" at the Geffen Playhouse, which opens Wednesday. Her upcoming films include "Saving Mr. Banks" and "Model Home. " "The Gift" is a play about two couples, and you play half of one of them as well as a kind of narrator. But this is a comedy, and you're not really known for that. Was comedy on your to-do list? I love to do comedy, and I don't think of things as drama or comedy.

At its most basic level, a 3-D printer is like an automated hot-glue gun programmed to spit out solid objects. The machines extrude layers of plastic into virtually any three-dimensional shape. Print whimsical garden statuary. Reproduce an anatomically correct heart with moving parts for your son's science project (actually, he could do that himself). Create a signature bookend, cookie cutter, necklace - anything. The buzz within the design world is that most homes could have one of these gadgets within 10 years.

It's the day after Christmas and all through the house, so much wrapping paper is spilling and suffocating my spouse. Here in Los Angeles, as in much of the rest of the United States, we recycle. Today our blue bins overflow with the paper and cardboard memory of our Christmas of abundance and good cheer. Across our city, and in many other distant cities, the bins of many book buyers overflow with the ubiquitous boxes and plastic cushions with which Amazon.com ships its products.

Packing up for your dog is a whole lot more convenient with the Pet King Portable Pet Bowl set, two sturdy plastic dog bowls joined by a hinge, with snap-on plastic lids. When not in use for food and water, the bowls fold back to back, and the plastic handles at the end of each bowl snap together to form a double carrying handle. The plastic lids hold solid food in, but are not quite watertight enough to keep liquids from leaking. The Pet King comes with a zippered nylon bag with shoulder strap and is available in two sizes.

One night past midnight behind Superior Supermarket in the City of Industry, a man was hard at work loading plastic containers into a white truck under the glow of streetlights. It was a sight Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy Shelley Jones had observed many times while on patrol, and if it hadn't been for a call she'd received a few days before, she wouldn't have given the man a second glance. A local dairy executive had phoned to report a mysterious phenomenon: Every night, plastic pallets used to distribute goods from warehouses, dairies and farms to stores were disappearing from Southern California businesses by the tens of thousands.

Are McDonald's fries made of plastic? Indestructible? Hardly, according to a new video from the Golden Arches. As part of an ongoing transparency initiative from the chain's Canadian outpost, the company shows viewers exactly how the potato snacks are made. The host: Scott Gibson, a supply chain manager for McDonald's Canada. The setting: a farm, a processing plant and a restaurant. The challenge: To show the French fry journey “farm to fryer.” The video shows potatoes being harvested and sorted at Levesque Farms in New Brunswick before being cut at McCain Processing Plant.

Woe to the thirsty of Concord, Mass. Under a bylaw born of convoluted reasoning, a person who heads into a store in that town for some hydration will be able to buy a plastic bottle of soda, but not a similar bottle of what dietitians say should be the drink of choice: water. That's because Concord has become the first city in the United States to ban the sale of serving-size bottled water. It's enough to make New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose proposed ban on the sale of large servings of soda is up for a key vote this week, weep.