Kickstart: Keeping of the green on St. Patrick's Day

For the estimated 400,000 people expected to attend today's St. Patrick's Day Parade in Savannah, Ga., community leaders would like to remind them all to be green.

The city has set up special recycling containers all along the parade route for plastic cups, bottles, paper, plastic plates and utensils. Separate bins will be set up for trash.

"We've all seen images of ruined squares and littered streets after Saint Pats," the city says on its website. "We all need to do our part to keep our squares clean and litter-free."

This will be the first St. Patrick's Day Parade since the start of COVID-19 for the city, although an estimated 30,000 people attended unofficial celebrations in 2021. Savannah's parade is the second-largest St. Patrick's Day Parade in the U.S. after the one in New York.

Do plastics companies still want to sell plastics?

Late last year, DuPont Co. announced a planned shakeup when it said it would sell its nylon business along with other high-profile materials. At about the same time, Pennsylvania-based Trinseo said it would sell its styrenics business. (In February, Celanese Corp. announced it would pay $11 billion to buy the bulk of DuPont's Mobility & Materials business.)

Netherlands-based Royal DSM said early this year that it is seeking a buyer for its materials business.

Then on March 15, France-based Solvay SA said it would split its business into two public companies: SpecialtyCo, a "pure play specialty leader with accelerated growth potential," and EssentialCo, an essential chemicals leader with "resilient cash generation."

"The ironic thing there is that for a long time, companies had gotten out of commodity resins and into engineering resins because they were looked at as better growth prospects and higher margins," Plastics News' Frank Esposito said in this month's Polymer Points Live webcast. "Unfortunately, it no longer makes sense at a financial level for these companies to be in the engineering resin business."

And as a result, don't expect much investment to add engineering resin production capacity in the near future.

Folks in the United Kingdom should be on the lookout for a stolen gorilla — a life-size plastic gorilla, to be precise, stolen from the pond of a home in Frome, England.

The BBC has the story of the early-morning theft from Chris Moss' home, one caught by security cameras. Moss said the gorilla was something of a local landmark, frequently visited by area children.

"It didn't cost a huge amount, but it was of huge sentimental value both for me and everyone in the community," Moss said.

The gorilla replaced a large pink flamingo garden mascot stolen previously.