Kickstart: A greener bottle

I have a lot of sports bottles, also known as "bike bottles," piled up on my kitchen counters, in cupboards, in my car and even on a bike or two. Some of them I received at events. Some were promotional giveaways. And some of them I have no idea where they came from.

German recreational equipment maker Vaude is out with a greener kind of reusable bottle, one that it says is the first made with 100 percent bio-based resin. The lid and the bottle itself are made from Braskem’s I’m Green sugarcane-based PE, while the mouthpiece is made with a customized bio-based thermoplastic elastomer from Hexpol.

Our sister publication Sustainable Plastics writes that the bottle is molded by Germany's Adoma.

So all that means that while I may not remember where all of my bottles came from, at least in the future I'll know what green material they came from.

Pretium Packaging LLC, meanwhile, is looking to the U.S. consumer market for some new business.

The blow molder has invested $3 million in Leipsic, Ohio, to add a new 10-cavity machine to mold high density polyethylene round 1-gallon bottles.

The bottles may not look exciting, but they fill a need for consumer demand for household cleaning products, the company says.

You probably saw an alert already last night or this morning that Intertech Plastics has been named the 2019 Plastics News Processor of the Year. PN's crew had a lot of great things to say not only about Intertech, but all of the finalists.

A full profile of Intertech will be coming up in a future edition of Plastics News but I'd encourage you to swing by the link above to see videos featuring all of the finalists. Take a look and check out what people throughout the companies, not just executives, have to say about them.

Each video takes about four minutes. You can space them out during the day, whenever you may need a break to remind yourself that there is some really great stuff happening out there in the plastics industry.