Kickstart: Mondays are for mergers

Most Mondays in the news world are kind of slow. At Plastics News its when we have time to finesse a Material Insights script, take a look at the space available for next week's issue and plan on when stories from this week's issue will appear on the website.

One bit of breaking news on a Monday is interesting. This Monday brought us mergers in the medical and packaging industries, a big investment in the U.S. by a Chinese firm, and resin pricing analysis from economist Bill Wood.

(OK, one of those items was written last week. Doesn't make pricing any less newsy.)

And that's without getting into the continuing watch on the coronavirus and its impact on the global business supply chain (and population) and General Motors Co.'s announcement that it will begin building an electric truck in Hamtramck, Mich., part of an electrification project that is also seeing it invest billions of dollars into battery production in Ohio.

As for the plastics mergers news? Two big companies are adding more specialized markets. Comar LLC, which came in at No. 22 in the most recent PN ranking of top injection molders, added medical device component manufacturing — along with two clean rooms — in buying iMark Molding Inc. of Wisconsin.

Silgan Holdings Inc., which holds down the No. 10 in injection molding, No. 20 in thermoforming and No. 8 in blow molding spots in PN rankings added more capabilities in closures by buying the dispensing business of Albéa Group.

Mattel's iconic Barbie doll has been putting in a lot of work lately to change its image from one leggy blonde model to a world of characters of all shapes, sizes and lives.

In the past few years, the Barbie Fashionista line has introduced plastic dolls that are shorter or maybe a little more zaftig. There are models who use a wheelchair and another with a prosthetic leg. The latest revamp adds a doll with the skin condition vitiglio and another with alopecia.

The idea behind these dolls — and similar efforts from Lego and other toymakers — is to reach out to more children, and make them feel welcome within the world of Barbie.

Mattel first teased the vitiglio doll on Instagram last year. (And, by the way, Barbie's Instagram feed is far better than mine. She even had a riff on the duct-taped-banana-as-art meme, using a tiny plastic shoe.)

But make no mistake. They're still able to rock the latest fashion.

The new dolls will be available in the spring of 2020.

General Motors Co. is putting its new carbon fiber truck bed on the GMC Sierra to the test in a new video that's been showing up on social media.

Maybe you've seen that 10-second clip of items flung against the truck bed via wind machines that simulate a Category 1 level storm. Compared to stones and a brick that punch a hole in a metal bed, the Sierra CarbonPro takes the punishment and remains intact.

But in the longer version of the video, engineering manager Mark Voss (who talked about the development of the box with Audrey LaForest last year) decides it can take more.

Cue the montage of house plants, a flat screen TV, garden gnomes, a picnic basket, a sofa and even — shades of Gallagher and his sledgehammer — a watermelon smashed against the bed.

Check out the full video here.