Kickstart: 'Make sure our people are safe'

The auto industry is getting back to work this week in Michigan (and some other states), although it's going to look a lot different.

While there are state and local guidelines to govern how plants should adjust production to protect workers — and in the auto industry, the UAW has had a lot of input into safety measures — employers also are focused on keeping their facilities safe.

"I'm not going to do anything in respect to putting production over people," Lear Corp. CEO Ray Scott told Dustin Walsh of our sister paper Crain's Detroit Business. "If we need to shut down again, we'll shut down. If that means we can't produce to our release schedules, then we won't. We're going to make sure our people are safe."

Lear, an automotive seat maker, opened its plant to the media on May 15 to show the measures it's taking, which mirror moves at other companies.

"Admittedly, walking into a production plant in the middle of a pandemic that's claimed the lives of nearly 86,000 Americans in the last 100 days is nightmare fuel," Walsh wrote in a blog about the visit. "I was fearful — for my safety and the safety of my family."

Of course the issues facing auto suppliers, and pretty much every company deemed nonessential, also include the financial ones.

Some companies already are feeling the punch with a couple of high-profile bankruptcies already in process.

Expect more.

"The watch word for the next three to four months is going to be liquidity within the supply base," Michael Robinet, executive director of IHS Markit automotive advisory, told PN's Sarah Kominek. "I can't ever remember the industry taking such a long period off and starting all on the same day. I mean, it's going to be bedlam."

With all the uncertainty, this week PN is hosting a couple of webinars to discuss what's going on with resin pricing and the overall economy as it affects the plastics industry.

First up, Editor Don Loepp and Senior Reporter Frank Esposito will discuss some of the fine points of resin pricing in the monthly "Polymer Points Live" webcast at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, May 19. Polymer Points Live is free to subscribers.

A day later, at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, May 20, Don will host "The Shape of the Recovery: An Economic Outlook," featuring PN Economist Bill Wood and Perc Pineda, chief economist for the Plastics Industry Association.

And just for something completely different in this gloom and doom, how about the sound of a fresh, crisp apple?

At least that's what users of the social media site TikTok think they've discovered from the 10-ounce PET bottle of Martinelli's apple juice.

Martinelli has been selling juice in PET bottles for more than a decade. The multilayer, hot-fill blow molded container, designed to mimic the shape of an apple and made by Graham Packaging, won a DuPont packaging award in 2006.

But in the midst of the coronavirus quarantine, bored social media users, for some reason, began biting their Martinelli PET bottles and delighted in the sound. The crinkling of thin PET, they declared, was exactly the sound of an apple.

Of course a thin PET water bottle will also make a crinkling noise. But the fact that the Martinelli bottle looked like an apple? That's the making of a viral video trend.

You can see a roundup of some of them on a few mainstream websites as well, if you don't have time to spend hunting them down individually.

But I have to say, I agree with TikTok user leahadriannaj: "I just want to know who discovered this."