Kickstart: A vexing vaccination question

With vaccines rolling out to more and more people, a new quandary is beginning to appear among business and government leaders. Should companies and groups require proof of vaccination for workers?

One of the few big institutions to sign on to the idea is Rutgers University in New Jersey, which has said that all 65,0000 students and 9,000 faculty members must be vaccinated before returning to the campus in the fall. But at the same time, leaders in some states, including Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, are adamant that they do not support vaccine passports.

Geoff Foster, CEO at injection molder Core Technology Molding Corp., noted during Plastics News' Executive Forum that his company will encourage employees to get a vaccination.

"I think it's going to be our protocol that … if you're traveling to Europe especially, you're going to be required to get a vaccine by us," he said.

H. Lee Murphy at our sister paper Crain's Chicago Business spoke to labor lawyers in Illinois about whether companies should require vaccinations, or if they can even legally require them.

"The answers so far are maybe and maybe, much to the consternation of employers who are looking to set hard and fast rules as they open their doors again after the year-long pandemic pause," Murphy writes.

While the law points to the ability of employers to require vaccines, there are also big loopholes in any requirement, including health and religious exceptions, attorneys said. And there's also the issue of who is willing or able to face lawsuits from either side of the vaccination requirement question.

"A company like Walmart is likely to face thousands of lawsuits and class actions on an issue like vaccinations, but it can absorb the legal cost far more easily than the small shopkeeper with 15 employees who might have just one of them file a lawsuit," attorney Stephen A. Glickman said.

We here at Plastics News are interested in hearing from plastics companies that may be looking at vaccination requirements. Feel free to drop me an email at [email protected] if you're interested in speaking to one of our reporters.

Florida has been dealing with flooding from a reservoir containing millions of gallons of contaminated wastewater near Tampa that sprung a leak, threatening nearby homes.

Early reports are eyeing leaks in a plastic liner at the site as a potential cause.

The Tampa Bay Times quotes an engineer saying there have been issues with the liner at the site in Manatee County.

"The condition of the liner ... is not particularly great," Mike Kelley, an outside engineer working with the property owner, HRK Holdings, told Manatee County commissioners on April 1. "It's old. There were some installation issues. There's a long-documented history of that liner system having problems."

The cause of the leak remains under investigation, with initial emergency response focused on controlling a possible flood.

Let's talk expansions. Two different companies from very different areas of the country are growing, both of them linked to sustainability.

In Macedon, N.Y., ABX Innovative Packaging Solutions LLC is spending about $12 million and adding 38 employees to meet increased demand for its sustainable line of flexible packaging.

Meanwhile, on the Texas-Mexico border, recycler Alandro Plastic Resources LLC is doubling its compounding capacity in Brownsville to allow it to process at least 600,000 pounds of post-industrial recycled material each month.

In both cases, company executives say the reason for growth is that customers are in search of more sustainable solutions, whether that's lighter-weight packaging or an increased supply of recycled material because of rising virgin material costs.