Kickstart: Yes, that's Harry Styles, and yes, there's a plastics connection

What happens when one of the biggest pop music stars on the planet goes on tour, but wants to limit his carbon footprint?

For Harry Styles (ask your kids or grandkids if you don't know the name), it means a tour contract with venues that works to eliminate single-use plastics while also providing outreach on issues related to sustainability and voting access.

For his new tour, Styles is working with Reverb, a nonprofit focused on sustainable music tours. His contracts require free water refill stations (concertgoers can bring their own bottle or buy a Nalgene bottle from the merchandise table), and also requires venues to use compostable or reusable foodservice cutlery. Recycling must be available throughout the arena and composting in the backstage area.

Beyond those moves, the tour is collecting batteries to be recycled or donated to organizations and is  donating unused toiletries from hotel stops to local shelters.

Reverb also worked with Styles for his 2018 tour and estimated the musicians and crew diverted 6,700 gallons of waste just from backstage and eliminated at least 3,000 single-use bottles just by the band and crew at that time.

It's been a long time since 1969. That was the year Richard Nixon first took office as president. It was the year that the Beatles did a live performance on a rooftop (their last live performance) and it was the year of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Woodstock and the Manson murders.

It was also the last year that Ford Motor Co. built a brand-new assembly plant in the U.S.

Until now.

On Sept. 27, Ford executives laid out ambitious plans for two new plants focused on supplying and building electric vehicles — the Blue Oval projects in Kentucky and Tennessee. In a news release, they noted that the company hadn't done a greenfield assembly plant construction project for more than 50 years in the country.

The $7 billion project will do more than assemble cars. Blue Oval City, to be built just north of Memphis, is three times larger than the massive Ford Rouge complex in Dearborn, Mich., and will also house a battery cell assembly plant and supplier park. Blue Oval SK, near Louisville, will be home to its joint venture with SK Innovation to make advanced lithium-ion batteries. SK is adding another $4.4 billion in investment there, bringing the total cost for the project to more than $11 billion, if all goes as planned.

In addition, Ford intends to power the project through renewable sources such as wind, solar and geothermal energy.

"It doesn't matter much if you build an EV if you're not as conscious about how you're building it," Lisa Drake, Ford's North America chief operating officer, told Automotive News. "The whole site layout and environment is just as important as the product we're building."

Bear with me here. I know this story is positively ancient in internet time, but it's still one of my favorite reads (and photos) of how to reuse plastics to create a Halloween costume. In this case, it involves the 1987 movie Robocop, an old bicycle helmet, a preschooler and a lot of upcycled plastic packaging.

In 2010, Jim Griffoen — who blogged under the name Sweet Juniper — wrote about creating a small replica of the titular Robocop for his son, who had requested a robot costume for Halloween.

"I decided just to make it out of crap I had in my basement," he wrote. "The helmet is an old bike helmet that didn't really fit him anymore. ... [The] circles on the sides were orange juice container lids. The chest piece is made out of an empty laundry detergent bottle and the back is made from milk jugs."

He also posted a series of photos taken around downtown Detroit, where the movie takes place.

The next year, the Sweet Juniper blog followed the making of a costume replicating one from the movie The Rocketeer (the jet pack was made from 2-liter soft drink bottles). So if you're the creative type, you may find some inspiration to kick-start your costume planning for this Halloween.