Kickstart: A long road ahead on sustainability

There's been a lot happening out there, so it can be easy to forget that just a few months ago, sustainability was a top message for many consumer product companies.

A reminder arrived on June 8 for World Oceans Day as the World Wildlife Fund released a report looking at the "challenges and potential solutions for tackling the plastic pollution problem." Transparent 2020 showed that the principal members of ReSource: Plastic — Keurig Dr Pepper, McDonald's, Procter & Gamble, Starbucks and Coca-Cola Co. — collectively used 4.2 million metric tons of plastic in one year, and only 8 percent of that was sourced from recycled content.

"While these figures represent the need to address infrastructure challenges around increasing recycled plastic, they also tell a story of partnership and transparency, which is critical to enabling meaningful progress to address the systemic issues on plastic waste," WWF said in a news release. "The principal members hope these efforts will inspire other companies to take similar action."

Transparency about plastics use by those companies is important to understand the collaboration needed to eliminate plastics in waterways, the groups said. That includes a focus on ramping up recycling.

"In particular, polypropylene recycling in the U.S. is highlighted as a strong opportunity for increased recycling," the release noted. "The U.S. recycling rate for polypropylene is close to zero ... and as the demand for quality recycled polypropylene far exceeds supply, collective action is needed to increase availability."

You've probably started to wear face masks at least on occasion. If you're like me, you've probably fumbled with the straps, fiddled with it to keep it in place and looked forward to when you can take it off.

So you probably have just a slight inkling of what health care workers — who must wear them tightly for hours at a time — are going through. Enter a new phrase into the plastics industry supply chain: ear savers. These are pliable bits of plastic that can hold a mask in place securely behind the head, but without putting extra pressure on the ears.

At first, the ear savers were produced a few at a time via 3D printing, but as demand grew, so did production. In the latest example, Iowa's MSI Mold Builders led an effort to make 50,000 ear savers it donated to medical workers in Iowa and South Carolina.

Here's a different, interesting take on face masks, via our sister paper Automotive News. Namely: If you're a company marketing to the public, do you change your advertising to show people wearing masks?

Obviously, most plastics companies don't have that direct-to-consumer appeal to consider, but their customers do. In a video discussion about the impact of COVID-19, officials from automakers noted it is something dealers are facing.

Matt VanDyke, Ford's director of U.S. marketing, said opinions vary.

When Ford showed some new advertising to dealers, about a third of those dealers said they would not use those ads if the people shown weren't wearing masks. Other dealers said the presence of masks in advertising would scare off customers.

"It really has created a challenge for us to get not just the tone of the advertising right, but literally just the visuals and how we treat it," VanDyke said.