Kickstart: Putting $12M into perspective

Ocean plastics pollution is a global problem that has attracted attention far beyond environmental groups. Consumer brand owners are getting involved, resin suppliers are backing cleanup efforts and a range of international governments also are looking at ways to control the flow of plastics into waterways.

As Steve Toloken writes, key members of the U.S. Senate have started talks into supporting some global project, similar to efforts focused on disease eradication. This is a complex issue, obviously, but one of the things Steve mentions is that the U.S. currently spends about $12 million of its foreign aid budget toward battling marine plastics.

So some level of spending is there. But $12 million doesn't go very far. And the federal budget tops $4 trillion, so $12 million isn't exactly a big commitment. To compare, here's a random sample of other projects the federal government recently budgeted $12 million for (according to a 15-minute Google search):

• Rebuilding a high school in Minnesota.

• Funding the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

• An initiative within the U.S. Department of Agriculture to make documents available digitally.

• Payments by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to a private detention center that held no more than 68 detainees per day.

• Paying toward construction of a portion of U.S. Route 48 in West Virginia.

During the past 20 years, I've covered a lot of stories about a lot of different industries from a lot of different angles for Plastics News. One coverage area that I would fear to cover? Resin pricing. Luckily, Frank Esposito is more than capable of tracking all the intricacies that are built into our regular pricing chart.

He gets a little bit into the difficulties tracking pricing in his latest blog, which gets behind the news related to ICIS' purchase of Chemical Data LLC.

"Plastic resin pricing largely has proven immune to futures contracts and other more transparent methods by which prices are set for commodities. The reasons for this are too complex to cover in a blog post," Frank writes, adding that "trying to figure out how resin pricing is done [is] kind of like having a difficult discussion with a kid about Santa Claus."

If any public company out there has seen its status grow through the pandemic, it's The Clorox Co.

Clorox wipes have been almost impossible to find, and its other cleaning products continue to fly off store shelves. Earlier this month, sales for its products climbed 37.8 percent in one week. In an interview with our sister publication Advertising Age, Clorox Chief Marketing Officer Stacey Grier talks about how her team is continuing to stress the role its products play in the marketplace.

She also gets into the question of supply and demand, which also requires them to think about how it packages its products.

"We're making 40 percent more than we did last year at this time. They're hitting store shelves but going as fast as we can get them into stores," she told Ad Age. "... We've seen [demand] up to 500 percent higher. No business is prepared for a 500 percent increase in demand.

"We increased our supply of hospital-grade bleach by 400 percent. Crisis is the mother of invention sometimes," she said. "We were able to invent a 55-gallon drum of bleach, which we were able to donate to large health care facilities."