Kickstart: Truly excellent

Each year, when staffers from Plastics News visit Processor of the Year finalists, they come back filled with stories and admiration about what those companies do.

Unfortunately, there can be only one POY winner. (With the exception of 2002, when two companies, Tech Group Inc. and Precise Technology Inc., tied for the prize.) Fortunately, PN's Excellence Awards honor those who excel in customer service, employee relations, technology and community service.

Here's a quick primer for winners in 2021:

• Comar LLC has been adding plants and employees during the past two years during a period of record growth, creating a "churn of the workforce ... like nothing I've ever experienced," CEO Mike Ruggieri said. To help new employees adapt to the company, it created "Comar University" to train new workers and help existing employees advance.

• PTI Engineered Plastics of Macomb, Mich., made and donated thousands of pieces of personal protective equipment early in the pandemic. The company also worked with a fourth-grader on the Little Inventors project, developing a prototype for "the Ocean Snake of Doom," a system that could collect marine trash.

• Proto Labs Inc., more commonly called Protolabs, is rewriting the idea of prototype tooling and production. "Turnaround speed is what our customers really love," said Greg Wesling, director of injection molding manufacturing operations. "They love the fact that they can have an idea, say on Wednesday ... and we can have parts in our hands by Friday or by Monday of next week."

• Teel Plastics LLC was known for its precision extrusion for the medical industry, but when COVID-19 arrived, it rapidly expanded production in both extrusion and injection molding to make testing swabs. It has now made more than 2 billion swabs.

We all know that high density polyethylene milk jugs are among the most recycled plastic items. A Spanish university is looking at recycling a piece of plastic used a lot further along the dairy supply chain.

The University of the Basque Country wants to recycle the thermoplastic polyurethane ear tags placed on cows' ears, items that are now thrown out once the cow is no longer being milked. (The tags help track each cow's milk production, marking yet another way that farms are using Industry 4.0 systems.)

Because each tag is earmarked — in this case literally — to a particular cow, they can't be reused, researchers said. But they are made of only one material, which means they should be easy to recycle.

Our sister paper Urethanes Technology International has more on the study.

This isn't precisely plastics-related — or at least not solely plastics-related — but it's a fun read I ran across while checking something on the National Institute of Standards and Technology website. (Assistant Managing Editor Steve Toloken brings up NIST in a new story related to federal policies and molecular recycling.)

The item I'm mentioning is a roundup of all the unusual measurements out there in the world and how they began. I already knew that a yard was determined based on the distance between the tip of the nose and the tip of a middle finger. (As measured by England's King Henry I in the 12th century, as the story goes.) Another English royal, King Edward II, declared in 1324 that the inch was the length of three grains of barley arranged end to end.

But what about a skor or a cubit or a hogshead or a slug? NIST has the answers.