Kickstart: The PPE winter games

The 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing are providing an opportunity show off the strengths of plastics — such as the urethane in bindings, skis and snowboards on the slopes — as well as a reminder that China is taking its COVID-19 precautions very seriously.

Social media posts have buzzed about what some people termed "dystopian" images of bartenders and other support personnel at Olympic venues and athlete housing clad head-to-toe in personal protective equipment.

Like the summer games in Tokyo in 2021, this COVID-era competition eliminates most of the in-person audience. Organizers in Beijing also ramped up safety protocols, even within the "closed-loop" system of the athletes' Olympic village. That's not a surprise. Since COVID was first detected in China in late 2019, the country has had some of the most strict protocols, including shutting down regions with millions of residents.

As athletes including former gold medalist snowboarder Shaun White showed in their social media stream, they have to wear masks and also don plastic gloves when they go through the cafeteria lines. Behind the counters, workers have face shields and PPE gowns and aprons. Bartenders working within the Olympics area are dressed as if they're handling nuclear materials and not simply mixing a cosmopolitan, Reuters wrote.

The National Inventors Hall of Fame has added a bit of fun into its class of 2022 with the addition of Lonnie Johnson to the hall.

Johnson has many strong qualifications for the hall. He's a nuclear engineer who developed the power system for NASA's Galileo spacecraft. And to relax while working on that project, he invented the Super Soaker.

That's right, the oversized water gun was created by a guy looking to relax from his day job making things to explore the galaxy.

The idea, Johnson told PN correspondent Michael Lauzon in 2015, didn't start as a toy. Instead, it was supposed to be a heat exchanger for a bathroom shower head.

"I was working on my heat pump project at night and during the day I worked on Galileo," he said. He was trying to replace fluorocarbon heat exchange fluid with water and had hooked up the nozzle to his bathroom faucet when a water jet streaming across the room gave him the idea for the high-powered toy water blaster.

His first version of the Super Soaker was made of PVC pipe, a PET bottle, nylon tubing and machined acrylic components. (That's him and his prototype pictured above, thanks to the U.S. Patent Office.) Now owned by Hasbro Inc., more than $1 billion worth of Super Soakers have been sold. It was named to the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2015.

And now the Inventors Hall of Fame has named the Alabama-born engineer to its list of top creators. Johnson — who also created the Nerf gun — is currently working on a new generation of rechargeable battery technology.

An honor of a different kind may be on the way for new building products, including some that feature plastics.

The National Association of Home Builders have named 40 finalists for the best new products out of 200 items nominated for a top prize at the International Builders' Show, taking place in Florida this week.

Those items include composite panels that mimic the look of real stone, recyclable PVC replacements for drywall and solar shingles that can be installed easily on residential roofs.

Catherine Kavanaugh has a roundup of the featured plastic products and will fill us in on the eventual winners at the show.