Kickstart: Plastic straws return to center stage

Remember the plastic straw debate? Before the pandemic, plastic straws were at the center of a lot of discussions on single-use plastics.

Well, they're back. Or rather, a ban on plastic straws is back on in the United Kingdom. As our sister paper Sustainable Plastics writes, the U.K. was supposed to phase in a ban on plastic straws, stirrers and cotton swab stems in April.

When the the coronavirus disrupted regular business — and supply chains for alternatives — the government moved the start date for the ban back to October. Now that's arrived.

"The ban on straws, stirrers and cotton buds is just the next step in our battle against plastic pollution and our pledge to protect our ocean and the environment for future generations," said U.K. Environment Secretary George Eustice.

Meanwhile in the U.S., coffee and doughnut shop chain Dunkin' has started a pilot program at 250 locations to replace standard plastic straws with biodegradable ones.

The blue-colored straw is made of polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA). Dunkin' didn't identify its supplier, but a PHA straw made by Danimer Scientific and WinCup won the Plastics Industry Association's 2020 Innovation in Bioplastics Award in August.

The plastics industry is a Top 10 business in the U.S., according to a new report from the Plastics Industry Association, ranking at No. 8, based on the value of shipments.

It also employs a little more than 1 million people nationwide, with the most jobs in California (although Michigan rates as the biggest concentration of plastics jobs).

The coronavirus pandemic obviously is creating "serious challenges" globally, the association said, with uneven growth ahead.

Packaging and health care products should provide for some sustained business, however.

Frank Esposito has more on the 2020 Size & Impact Report.

There's a new reference to plastics in pop culture. No, not from The Graduate. That would be more than 50 years old and repeated far too often.

This one is brief, new and courtesy of the TV series Fargo. In the fourth season premiere, Chris Rock's character, a gangster named Loy Cannon in Kansas City in the 1950s, meets with a banker to fill him in on a "billion-dollar idea."

It's a line of credit individuals can use to make themselves look richer than they are.

"We call it a credit card," Cannon says.

When the banker comments the steel prototype is heavy, Cannon and his partner say they'll make the final one out of a lighter material.

"For instance, there's a lot of exciting things happening these days in plastics," Cannon says.