Kickstart: Spooky season digs up more sales

Giant plastic skeletons are more than a new Halloween decoration trend for American lawns. For big-box retailers, they've become an unexpected revenue stream during what was usually a slow month for sales — sales that also generate consumer loyalty.

"Something like Halloween, I mean, it's not an enormous business for us, but to say [it's] unbelievable engagement … [and] 100 percent discretionary [spending], is a pretty decent telltale of engagement in the sector," Home Depot CEO Ted Decker said at an August event.

Adrienne Pasquarelli at our sister paper Advertising Age writes that Atlanta-based Home Depot only began selling any Halloween decorations 10 years ago, but it dug up something completely new when it released a 12-foot plastic skeleton in 2020.

"As COVID hit, everybody was sitting at home, bored, searching the Internet looking for fun stuff and then we came out with this giant 12-foot skeleton," Lance Allen, senior merchant of decorative holiday at Home Depot, told Ad Age. "It went viral so quick."

Since then, Home Depot has added to its giant seasonal offerings, with an even taller character — a 13-foot Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas for 2023 — selling quickly online and in stores. Other national retailers such as competitor Lowe's and Costco have added their own over-sized spooky offerings to boost its fall sales.

Perhaps it's best to take the latest news about chemical recycling with a grain of salt.

Or make that several grains.

Researchers at Michigan State University have published a study in Advanced Sustainable Systems stating that plain old table salt (sodium chloride) outperforms expensive chemicals as a catalyst in the pyrolysis of polyolefins, our sister paper Sustainable Plastics reports.

The group looked at using table salt to facilitate low-temperature pyrolysis of high density polyethylene, low density PE, linear LDPE and polypropylene.

Researchers then compared the results to the costs of other catalyst materials. Platinum, for instance, works well but costs $29,000 per kilogram. Table salt comes in at 4 cents per kilogram.

"This is really exciting," said Muhammed Rabnawaz, associate professor at MSU's School of Packaging. "We need simple, low-cost solutions to take on a big problem like plastics recycling."

Honickman Cos., a New Jersey-based bottler of PepsiCo Inc. and Canada Dry beverages, has raised more than $1 million for charities at its annual golf tournament since it started in 2020.

Now it is out to build on that amount, although the 2023 event will be slightly delayed.

The golf course that houses the annual event has seen some flooding, company representatives said, so the company had to postpone the Sept. 11 event to Sept. 26. Money raised will go to Volunteers of America-Greater New York chapter and the United Negro College Fund.