Kickstart: A bottle of red, a bottle of white, a bottle of PET

This week, huh?

If you feel the desire to have a glass or two of wine to help you relax into the weekend, perhaps you can consider one sent to you via the mail in a very sustainable PET package.

United Kingdom-based Garçon Wines has developed a new kind of wine bottle: rectangular, made of recycled PET, 87 percent lighter than traditional glass bottles and still able to hold the same amount of wine.

And the bottles are not only cheaper to ship because they're lighter, but also they fit inside a box that can be delivered through a mail slot. Developers Santiago Navarro and Joe Revell first focused on a bottle that could be delivered more easily to individual homes. (Say, to someone in a wine club.)

Garçon won a Plastics Recycling Award Europe in 2019. 

And packaging giant Amcor Ltd. just announced a collaboration with Garçon to produce its bottles in the U.S. In addition, Garçon will be at ProWein in Düsseldorf, Germany, in March looking to sign up more users.

Bottle makers (and the beverage makers who use those bottles) are under a lot of pressure.

Plastics News has two stories on changing consumer attitudes and what that will mean to packaging.

Steve Toloken reports on a study by Jefferies Financial Group that says bans and fees on single-use packaging could slow the rate of growth for packaging from the current 3-5 percent to 1 percent.

Meanwhile, Jim Johnson attended The Packaging Conference where the head of the American Beverage Association says the group — representing beverage giants including Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo Inc. — is willing to at least listen to proposals for bottle bills, although it finds fault with many that exist now.

This, above, is a Nike Air Zoom Alphafly Next% running shoe. Yes, it looks strange. It's also, according to the latest ruling by World Athletics, legal for international competition including the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. And soon you'll be able to buy it. If you're willing to pay $250, that is.

It's the shoe at the heart of the running shoe revolution, marrying carbon fiber plates and proprietary foam in combinations that allegedly enable runners to go 4 percent faster. (Eliud Kipchoge was wearing a similar prototype when he broke two hours in the marathon, in an event sponsored by Ineos, in Vienna last year.)

The question has been whether those shoes, and similar ones in development by other shoemakers, would be banned under new guidance by World Athletics, the group governing global track and field. On Jan. 31, World Athletics ruled: No shoes with a sole thicker than 40 millimeters, and shoes can have only one carbon fiber plate.

(The Alphafly comes in at 39.5 mm and will go on sale Feb. 29, just in time for U.S. Olympic marathon trials in Atlanta.)

What does this mean? For now, expect to see a lot of new shoes out on the road .... for people who can afford them at least. And for suppliers of polyurethane foam to shoe companies Nike, Brooks, Adidas and other competitors? The big race for an evolution in shoes has just hit the starting line.