Kickstart: An award worthy of Bill Carteaux

It's been almost exactly two years since Bill Carteaux died. The leader of the Plastics Industry Association from 2005 until his death on Dec. 10, 2018, Carteaux was a champion of the industry and credited with keeping NPE alive in 2009 when companies were considering pulling out of the trade show during the Great Recession.

Now the association has created the William R. Carteaux Leadership Award for "an industry professional who has achieved distinction working for the betterment of the plastics industry."

The first award will be presented during NPE2021 in Orlando, Fla., during the Plastics Hall of Fame ceremony on May 16.

Nominations are now being accepted. Candidates can be nominated by "peers, family or friends," the association said. The Plastics Academy, which administers the Plastics Hall of Fame, will screen candidates with Plastics Industry Association officers making the final selection.

Find more information here.

How far are you willing to take your interest in using recycled plastics? Sure we all appreciate recycled PET in our water bottles, HDPE returning to our showers in the form of new shampoo bottles and LDPE going from film to decks.

But what about your favorite meat in tube form?

Sustainable Plastics has this item on a team of companies — DSM, Sabic, Cepsa, Fibrant and Viscofan — representing two raw material producers, an energy company, a producer of caprolactam, ammonium sulfate and their byproducts and a casings expert, who created multibarrier casing for meat products made through advanced recycling of post-consumer plastics.

To be clear, this is not an edible casing, but instead flexible packaging for the meat. But it seems like a good test case to determine how willing you are to put your faith in the safety chemical recycling of plastics for food products.

This isn't about plastics specifically, but something worth considering as stresses from the holiday/COVID-19/politics trifecta ramp up. Maybe it's time to consider giving something up as a yearend promise. Not something like carbs, but rather allowing yourself or your business to reduce responsibilities.

In a column in our sister publication Crain's Chicago Business, Emily Drake and Todd Conner — who together facilitate Crain's Leadership Academy — suggest a new approach.

"If prior years invited us to add new priorities to our plates, this year might instead be an opportunity to commit to some New Year's dissolutions," Conner writes.

That could include social media diets or planning a spring staycation rather than worrying about traditional spring break travel. Maybe even deciding that sourdough just isn't your thing after all.

But there are also considerations for companies.

"I would love to see CEOs step forward and ask, 'What should be our 2021 New Year's dissolutions?' We default to viewing leadership, and organizational strategy by extension, as an additive exercise," Conner said. "More goals, more metrics, more programs, more priorities. We conflate that with progress, yet simplicity is a virtue, too. Declaring that 'this year we will do less, better' can be a welcome rallying cry for exhausted and disoriented workforces."

You can read more here.