Kickstart: Earth Day and a barrel of monkeys

Most years the arrival of Earth Day would bring with it a series of sustainability-themed news releases.

For 2020, the 50th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22, things were a bit more complicated.

Rather than "here's how we're reducing our single-use plastics" stories, it was more about "here's how we're making gowns/masks/shields for health care workers so they don't have to reuse these items."

Not that those angles on reducing plastics waste are being completely forgotten, but it seems that during a pandemic things are a little more complicated.

Consider the regions that are curtailing recycling collections or — as in my state of Michigan — putting a temporary hold on bottle return programs to help reduce exposure to the coronavirus by retail workers.

As Steve Toloken notes, the National Association for PET Container Resources and three other industry associations have issued a statement asking state governments to make safe redemption and return options available again as soon as possible, so recyclers do not miss out on the stream of PET bottles collected through the programs.

Earth Day still brought its share of releases, many of them repeating information about plastics that is questionable at best.

Like the oft-quoted number that the United States goes through 500 million plastic straws per day. (The number actually was generated as part of a report by a then-9-year-old, as Plastics News wrote about in 2018.)

For Editor Don Loepp, the number that showed up this year was "32 percent." As in claims that 32 percent of all plastic packaging ends up in the ocean.

As Don noted, that number is linked to a study from the World Economic Forum finding that 32 percent of the 78 million tons of plastic packaging produced annually "escapes collection systems" and ends up many places, including the potential to clog urban infrastructure.

So while that is a lot of packaging that isn't disposed of properly — and while ocean plastics are a problem — that doesn't mean that 32 percent of packaging ends up in the ocean.

One of the annoying — if not necessarily life-threatening — issues health care professionals are dealing with now is red and irritated skin behind their ears from wearing their protective face masks constantly.

In response, plastics companies from Covestro to Westfall Technik are molding and providing straps to hold those masks in place behind the head and provide a little relief to ears.

But some nurses and doctors have turned to the toy aisle instead.

As I've noticed on Facebook (and mentioned here by the blog Totally the Bomb) health care workers have discovered that the arms on a Barrel of Monkeys plastic monkey also works in a pinch.

Ladies and gentlemen, I salute your creativity. And whenever I can get into the office to retrieve my Plastics News-branded monkeys from an old NPE, they're all yours.