Kickstart: The Cozy (green) Coupe

The New York Toy Fair wraps up Feb. 25. This year it's bringing us — yes, a lot of Baby Yoda merchandise — but also a big push on sustainable toys.

That doesn't necessarily mean new brands. Take a look at Little Tikes, for example, which is rolling out a new "Go Green" line rotomolded entirely from post-consumer and post-industrial recycled plastics along with what its owner says is a "new patent-pending compound" that makes them more recyclable and able to degrade in landfill conditions.

The "Go Green" line is launching with four products: a slide, toybox, ride-on tricycle and tractor. MGA Entertainment Inc., the owner of Little Tikes and the L.O.L. Surprise toy line, has pledged that by 2025 it will "only manufacture products that will degrade when disposed of properly."

That means its L.O.L. Surprise line of toys will have a biodegradeable ball and all accessory bags will be paper-based, while any packaging will be made using the degradeable resin.

A few years ago, I'd never heard of luxury vinyl tile. And I'm pretty sure while the peel-and-stick flooring squares I installed in my kitchen in the '90s were vinyl, they sure weren't luxury.

But the new LVT can mimic wood or stone flooring and has proved to be one of the fastest-growing segments of the home construction and remodeling market. (LVT was also part of the U.S.-China trade war, as Steve Toloken wrote about last year.)

Growing sales are prompting investments in U.S. production, most recently apparent in the Feb. 20 release that New Jersey's Mannington Mills Inc. is spending $22 million for a plant in Calhoun, Ga.

Also on the LVT side of the plastic industry, check out this interview from public radio's Marketplace with Harlan Stone, the CEO of HMTX Industries, about how it is handling the impact of the coronavirus on its production in China. The interview with Stone begins about four minutes into the report.

No, not Oscars. It's time to celebrate the plastics industry.

This week at the Plastics News Executive Forum in Naples, Fla., PN will honor the Best Places to Work and name its 2019 Processor of the Year.

The 20 companies named Best Places to Work are listed alphabetically here. We'll count them down according to their ranking during the forum, Feb. 24-26. We'll also profile each of the companies in the March 30 issue of Plastics News.

And Feb. 26 we'll announce which of four companies — Diversified Plastics Inc., Intertech Plastics Inc., MMI Engineered Solutions Inc. and PTI Engineered Plastics — is the 2019 Processor of the Year.

If you can't make it to Naples, watch plasticsnews.com. We'll send an alert after the winner is named. And you can always read up on the finalists while you wait.