Kickstart: Gold, silver, bronze, recycling at the Olympics

Organizers of this year's Olympic games in Tokyo have been very, very serious about recycling.

First they reached out to consumers in Japan, who donated more than 6 million used mobile phones, which were then stripped down to their parts to source the gold, silver and bronze for Olympic medals.

Now it has unveiled beds for the athlete village with bases made from cardboard and mattresses from Japan's Airweave, sourced from polyethylene. Both the bases and mattresses will be recycled after the Olympics and Paralympics.

(And if you were worried, the cardboard beds are rated to hold more than 400 pounds and organizers say they will hold up to even the most raucus, champagne-soaked celebration party.)

NBC's "Today Show" last week included an video with Beth Terry, an Oakland, Calif., resident who has written about her attempts to live an "almost plastic free" life for the past 13 years.

The segment, part of a segment on getting a cleaner and greener start to the year, focuses on Terry's efforts to avoid plastic in the kitchen by using glass or metal containers and in the bathroom by using shampoo bars rather than shampoo from bottles.

In an interview with Plastics News in 2013, Terry makes sure to point out that being plastic free isn't really possible.

"I use plastic — I'm talking to you on a phone, which is plastic, my computer is plastic, all the technology I have is plastic — but I've bought very, very few new plastic things since I started this project five years ago. I try to make use of what already exists by getting things second-hand or by finding a way to rent or borrow, to repair things when they break," she said.

This morning, Plastics News announced four companies who are finalists for the 2019 Processor of the Year: Diversified Plastics Inc., Intertech Plastics Inc., MMI Engineered Solutions Inc. and PTI Solutions Inc.

Intertech also was a finalist for the 2018 award.

Editor Don Loepp and reporter Bill Bregar will visit all four companies as part of the judging, but here are a few tidbits on each company to explain why they're finalists:

• Diversified Plastics is owned by employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, and company officials say that gives it an advantage. The ESOP stock price has jumped 72 percent in last three years and revenue per employee went up 12.4 percent.

• Intertech draws talent from the Eaglecrest High School robotics team, which the company sponsors. The first apprentice, a robotics team member named Kevin King, came in his junior year and built vision system that uses two cameras. "Today, Kevin is a full-time automation technician and [we] are paying for his engineering degree."

• MMI scored the highest marks in the employee relations criteria. Management has worked hard to make MMI an "employer of choice" and develop a career path for advancement. Employees have seven "tracks" in leadership, warehouse and technical track, with several job categories in each track.

• Investing in a closed-loop water system with in-house water treatment means that PTI cut water consumption by 40 percent, or 80,500 gallons. For the last three years, the company has invested about $60,000 in lighting upgrades, including automatic shutoff. Even waste oil and lubricants get recycled. By working with the local electric supplier, PTI sends that to a local farm to heat its barns through a 99 percent fuel and waste-efficient furnace.