Kickstart: Beyond the paycheck

For CEOs, base salaries often are only a small part of their pay.

There are stock awards and bonuses that often make up more of their compensation than their official paycheck. But when our research intern, Kelly Arndt, began looking at CEO compensation for publicly traded plastics processors, she also found company leaders who gave up part of their pay during 2020 to make sure employees were rewarded for their efforts as they turned up to make sure production continued throughout the pandemic.

Sometimes the entire leadership team cut their pay, sometimes just the CEO.

You can read her analysis of CEO pay here in the All Things Data blog.

As expected, when we spoke to top executives this year for our CEO special report, COVID-19 raised a lot of new challenges for leaders.

"I believe the pandemic and resulting actions required to operate safely and continuously challenged us to look at what was mission critical in our processes and what was not. … We created new processes, obsoleted some processes and created workarounds with creativity and resolve," said Andrew Thompson, CEO of Inhance.

A few years ago, when visiting family in Sweden, I encountered a very complex system related to garbage.

There was the typical sorting of recyclables, of course, but also a separate bags for items that would go to an incinerator. I found the process of knowing what items were supposed to go in which bag a bit confusing, but it was part of the regular disposal system for many Scandanavian countries.

But not for much longer.

Swedish Plastic Recycling — Svensk Plaståtervinning — will invest more than $100 million in a new project that aims to make the incineration of plastic waste in Sweden a thing of the past.

Site Zero will be located at an existing company site in Motala, about midway between Stockholm and Gothenburg, and will be able to handle more than 200,000 metric tons of plastic waste each year, and sort and recycle 12 different types of plastic, our sister paper Sustainable Plastics writes.

"At Site Zero, zero packaging goes to incineration," CEO Mattias Philipsson said.

Any bits of plastic that cannot be recycled by more traditional means will go into a chemical recycling process.

Does a 3 percent increase in water fees make you less angry if it's explained by Lego figurines?

The city of Arlington, Texas, recently rolled out a video to explain its budget priorities for next year, but turned to the friendly bricks of Lego to spruce up the message.

The preliminary budget was adapted to a simple 4-minute video posted on YouTube in August, explaining which groups receive local tax funds, and what the city will do with that money. (Hiring more firefighters, spending $1.2 million on new playgrounds and $31 million on new storm sewer projects, for example.)

You may be asking yourself right now if it was really worth the time and effort to create the Lego budget explanation, but personally, I now know more about capital projects planned for a Texas town than my own. So yes, it was probably worth it.