Kickstart: Trying to prepare for the future

We're all ready to put 2020 behind us, right? But of course merely flipping the calendar over to a new year won't change anything, so we're all taking precautions. For the plastics industry, planning for NPE2021 is underway with a wary eye to how conditions will be May 17-21 in Orlando, Fla. (Catherine Kavanaugh will have more on this in her machinery outlook in next week's print issue of PN.)

Already some early 2021 events are being postponed. The Chicago Auto Show had been set for Feb. 13-21, but now organizers are saying it will be an unspecified date in "spring 2021." In Germany, Messe Düsseldorf has canceled Interpack, scheduled to run Feb. 25 to March 3. In fact, it has canceled all events at the site, which is also home to the K show, until April 2021.

But May is months later, and vaccines may be rolling out to the general population prior to that. Even the World Economic Forum is looking to May 2021 for a change. The event, which normally would be in Davos, Switzerland, in January, is instead scheduled for May 13-16 in Singapore. (It'll return to Switzerland in 2022, organizers said.)

So maybe that's a sign that May really will be a return to normal. We'll have to wait and see and hope.

I was today years old when I found out that those protective tubes around young trees have a name: tree shelters. And while learning that I also learned that a major maker of those shelters, Tubex — itself part of Berry Global Group Inc. — has launched a program to collect and recycle them.

The Tubex collection and recycle program is geared toward customers who use a lot of the polypropylene shelters. Customers can order bulk bags from their Tubex supplier to store the shelters, then arrange to have the bags collected when full.

The recycled PP will go back into new shelters or other Berry products. Our sister paper Sustainable Plastics has more on it.

Back in October when we wrote about Home Depot's 12-foot plastic skeleton and how it had sold out, you probably thought it was silly to spend more than $300 for a decoration only usable for one holiday.

But just like the ghost of holidays past, the skeleton has returned for Christmas, with owners setting him up in new poses and with new props. Like a Grinch costume, or the abominable snowman from the holiday classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

The website Insider has more examples of this holiday recycling.