Kickstart: Feeding hungry athletes, sustainably

When you're going out on an endurance sports adventure, you want to make sure you have enough food with you. A multiday trip? More food.

Now imagine packing enough food for four people for 55 days. Oh, and you want sustainable options for packaging, too.

That's what was facing the Bristol Gulls, an all-female team competing in the 2020 Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge — a nearly 3,000-mile rowing competition across the Atlantic Ocean.

Luckily sponsor Mondi has a monomaterial flexible packaging option that could be used to vacuum seal enough food to provide 5,000 calories per day, per athlete, but still be capable of being recycled.

"We wanted the boat to be sustainable, alongside everything else, including our food packaging, clothing, cosmetics and hygiene products," Gulls crew member Phoebe Wright said.

The race began Dec. 12 from the Canary Islands and ends in Antigua. The record crossing is about 29 days, while the record for an all-female team is 34 days.

If you've ever been in the middle of a home improvement project (or assembling some Ikea furniture) and found yourself stuck with what to do next, you may have discovered the wonderful world of tutorial videos on YouTube. These simple, step-by-step instructions are often easier to understand than a complex series of line drawings.

So you may understand the value of a new series of videos machinery company Arburg GmbH + Co KG is creating to explain manufacturing tips.

"The world is getting more digital, more networked and more complex all the time. The challenge lies in explaining the complex in a way that everyone can understand and putting relevant aspects and innovations in a nutshell," Arburg writes in a news release.

Christoph Schumacher, department manager marketing and corporate communications at Arburg, hosts the first video, an "explainer video about explainer videos."

This week's print issue of Plastics News has our annual machinery outlook, written by Catherine Kavanaugh.

You can read one of those online now, about extruder makers, and others will be posted online throughout this week. Or you can access the digital edition if you don't want to wait.

The common thread throughout Cathy's stories is, obviously, the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. What also stands out is how quickly machinery makers were able to adapt and adjust to get needed equipment out to essential businesses quickly.