Kickstart: Raise a colorful mug for the man behind some iconic plastic housewares

It's time to mark the career of an entrepreneur who brought to a wider market some of the most iconic plastic housewares product lines of the 1970s.

Alan Heller, who died Aug. 13, partnered with Italian designer Massimo Vignelli to resurrect plastic stackable plates, cups and other items that were first made in Italy. As the New York Times notes in his obituary, Heller grew up in a family-owned company that made housewares out of aluminum. When he saw Vignelli's line, he flew to Italy and bought up the molds to begin production in the U.S., tweaking them slightly for American tastes. The rainbow-colored "Hellerware" was produced and sold at a price most people could afford.

"To Americans of a certain age, Heller dinnerware is as potent a madeleine to the 1970s as a Marimekko print," Penelope Green wrote in the Times.

Some pieces of Heller's work are in Syracuse University's The Plastics Collection, and I recall using several of those pieces at a college apartment.

Heller went on to work with French designer Philippe Starck on a toilet brush, marketed as Excalibur, and Italian designer and architect Mario Bellini on a one-piece molded plastic chair. Heller Inc. still sells the injection molded, fiberglass-reinforced polypropylene Bellini chair.

The U.S. Gulf Coast is likely due for some rough weather this weekend or early this week.

The National Hurricane Center said Ida, currently a tropical storm located near Cuba, is likely to pick up intensity and arrive along the coast by the morning of Aug. 30. The federal agency has posted a hurricane watch for landfall between Cameron, La., to the Mississippi/Alabama border. Storm surge warnings also have been set for a longer stretch of coastline.

Two hurricanes, Laura and Delta, hit Lake Charles, La., particularly hard in 2020, leading to shutdowns and transportation issues for resin companies in the region. Shortages from those storms were then amplified by an ice storm in Texas in February this year.

Hopefully we avoid those complications in 2021, but as we all know, we can't control the weather; we can just prepare for it.

If a visit to one of the U.S. National Park Service sites is still on your list for a summer vacation, Tupperware Brands Corp. has some items you can take with you to support the parks and reduce plastics waste.

The items created in a collaboration with the National Park Foundation feature images from parks like Yosemite and the Grand Canyon, with reusable snack and sandwich containers, cups and bottles.

Three of the containers — a cup for hot or cold drinks, sandwich and snack boxes — use a proprietary "Eco+" material made from food-safe plastic from a mixed-plastic recycled feedstock.

Funds raised through the partnership are also paying to place water filling stations at parks, Tupperware said in a news release.