Kickstart: The Nanny wants to clean up TV

It's not every day that Plastics News gets to quote a celebrity about plastic waste in the environment. It's not that celebrities don't like to talk about plastics and pollution. They do. A lot. Often while touting their own brands or speaking about a sponsor's brands.

Some do more than just talk. Harry Styles, for instance, uses his contract to enforce better recycling and fewer single-use plastics during his tours.

In 2019, the actor Ted Danson shared a table with Plastics Industry Association CEO Tony Radoszewski during a congressional hearing to talk about the environmental impact of plastics. (Danson is vice chair for environmental group Oceana.)

And now Fran Drescher, whose resume includes the sitcom The Nanny, is taking on plastics as part of her role as the new president of the Screen Actors Guild to support an effort by the Plastic Pollution Coalition to "Flip the Script on Plastics."

The effort, supported by Drescher and other actors during a webinar, Assistant Managing Editor Steve Toloken writes, wants to see more TV shows and movies normalizing the use of reusable containers and eliminate or reduce the use of single-use plastics on screen.

A study in November from the PPC looked at how single-use plastics were portrayed across 51 hours of programming on 32 popular TV shows in 2019 and 2020. It found an average of 28 single-use plastic items showed up in each episode, but only 7 percent of the items were disposed of properly on screen.

The Pope has gone on the record: Throwing plastic in the ocean is bad.

In a wide-ranging interview with Italian television on Feb. 6, Pope Francis took on plastic pollution along with excessive spending on armaments, defending the rights of migrants and "ideological rigidity" from conservative Catholics, Reuters reports.

Francis has made past statements condemning waste, saying that people must take action in "looking after creation."

In the interview, Reuters reported, Italian fishermen came to him to discuss how much plastic trash they found in the Adriatic Sea. They later told him they found even more, but they also took action to clean some of it up.

"Throwing plastic into the sea is criminal. It kills biodiversity, it kills the earth, it kills everything," he said.

Soon after French auto supplier Faurecia SA opened a major interiors injection molding parts plant in the Detroit suburbs about 10 years ago or more, a top executive sat down with the media to talk about the company's growing plans for North America.

One of the first questions: How do you pronounce the company name?

There were typically two schools of thought — four-CEE-ah and four-EEE-see-ah — along with the occasional four-ESS-cia. "As long as companies buy our products, we don't care," the executive said.

Now the company, itself created through the merger of two suppliers — Faure and ECIA — has picked a new corporate identity to represent its acquisition of lighting supplier Hella: Forvia. (The Faurecia and Hella names will live on as divisions of Forvia.)

Will automakers remember the new name when it's time to award future contracts? As that executive might say: "As long as they buy our products, we don't care."