Kickstart: How about some berry good sustainable packaging news?

Welcome to fresh fruit season, and for this year Waddington Europe, part of Novolex, is working with distributor Produce Packaging to roll out soft fruit containers made with 100 percent recycled material — a combination of post-consumer and post-industrial PET — that is also fully recyclable after use.

The 100 percent recycled content is a jump from Produce Packaging's existing line with at least 80 percent recycled content.

But, as Mark Tierney, managing director of Produce Packaging, notes in a news release, to truly make the packaging circular, recycling streams have to open up to thermoformed PET.

"Our hope is that taking the lead in expanding the use of packaging made completely out of recycled content for consumers will help drive demand for recycled content, which in turn will encourage more local authorities to invest in their recycling regimes and infrastructure," Tierney said.

The state of plastic bag bans is confusing, especially in some states.

Early during the pandemic, some governments lifted bans on single-use retail bags as health officials, retailers and shoppers tried to figure out whether reusable bags would help spread COVID-19.

Some states and communities that had pending bans delayed implementation. State leaders in Washington, for instance, pushed back an 8-cent fee on bags that was supposed to go into effect in January. No specific new date has been announced yet.

But consumers are getting mixed messages in social media in the state that they will have to start paying a fee starting July 1. (The original law would have had a six-month grace period before the fee would begin.) The issue has been confusing, according to local media in the state.

In addition, legislators in Colorado have approved a statewide bag ban — along with an expanded polystyrene packaging ban — and added to it an action to rescind a previous rule that banned communities from enacting their own local bans.

Colorado becomes the 10th state to enact a statewide ban bill, and the first inland state to do so.

Plastic tubing maker NewAge Industries is marking a decade of solar power. The company flipped the switch on its 4,082 rooftop solar panels at its Southampton, Pa., plant on June 8, 2011.

The panels are capable of producing 1 megawatt of energy continuously, which was enough to provide half the power to the plant at that time. Expansions since 2011 mean that NewAge has to buy more power from its utility, but less than it originally did.

"It was our most ambitious project to date," CEO Ken Baker said in a news release. "As a U.S. manufacturer, we insisted on U.S.-manufactured products — the solar panels, the racking system that holds all the panels, the inverters that convert the electrical current — and it took a lot of research to source everything."

NewAge makes single-use tubing assemblies used in vaccine production.

It said the solar panels — along with upgrades to lighting, ventilation and windows and a waste disposal upgrade to move to zero landfill strategy — helped the company reduce operating costs while improving sustainability.