Kickstart: A swab story

I, like so many others, have found myself getting sucked into a new mystery. It's not the latest true crime podcast or bingeable TV show, but rather something affecting us personally. The question appears at least once a week on a group text chain: Do you know where we can find COVID-19 home tests in stock?

It's a question facing individuals, companies and schools trying to keep the latest pandemic surge under control. It's also one that involves the plastics industry.

Puritan Medical Products of Maine is the only U.S.-based maker of swab sticks used in the COVID-19 test kits and it relies on suppliers like Teel Plastics LLC of Baraboo, Wis., to make the plastic sticks used for those swabs.

Teel — one of five finalists for Plastics News' Processor of the Year — is in the midst of expanding extrusion and injection molding production in Wisconsin to keep up with demand.

While it may seem like a straightforward business story about demand outstripping supply and investments in U.S.-made medical products, the background at Puritan Medical Products is far more complex than expected.

As Bloomberg reported last year, Puritan is a family-owned company in which certain members of the family don't get along. There's an ongoing lawsuit between cousins leading the company.

In 2020, the federal government invoked the Defense Production Act to invest $250 million in Puritan to boost production even if company leaders couldn't reach an agreement on how to expand, Bloomberg wrote.

The lawsuit is continuing even as Puritan continues to ramp up production in Maine while also building a new plant in Tennessee, the Washington Post wrote last week. (Timothy Templet, Puritan Medical Products' executive vice president of sales, is not commenting on the suit.)

Worker shortages have already led to rising wages for manufacturing employers who are competing with restaurants and retailers to fill empty jobs. Now a grocery store chain has added another benefit to the battle for staff: paid family leave.

At the end of December, Florida-based Publix announced that starting in 2022 all employees — full time or part time — will receive at least two weeks of paid time off for the birth or adoption of a child.

"We frequently review our benefits to continually offer a comprehensive package to our associates," Publix spokesperson Maria Brous told Florida Politics.

Full-time workers could access as much as six weeks of paid time off through the program, depending on how many years they have worked for the chain.

A family leave act that is part of a massive budget and spending program awaiting a vote in the U.S. Senate would require family leave but does not require employers to pay their workers during that leave.

Residents in Boise, Idaho, who have diligently placed "hard-to-recycle" plastics in orange bags for the Hefty EnergyBag program now will be able to see what has happened to those items marked with numbers 4-7 in the resin identification code.

Los Angeles-based recycler ByFusion is compacting plastics from the EnergyBag program in its "ByBlocker" machine and converting it into blocks about the size and shape of a concrete block, but much lighter.

Troy Oppie of Boise State Public Radio News writes that in the past, most of the plastics collected in the orange bags ended up incinerated at a concrete plant. But working with ByFusion, the material is going into benches, retaining walls and other outdoor projects.

The materials aren't melted down, so the colors and varied past lives of the plastics are apparent.

"Boiseans can see the blocks for themselves at Manitou Park, where a base for a new bench has been constructed from the plastic blocks," Oppie wrote. "The mix of materials is evident, with remnants of yogurt containers, plastic utensils and even a fully readable barcode visible."