Kickstart: Add housing issues to expansion planning

If you're planning a big expansion, there's a question you may want to ask yourself before picking a location: Is there enough housing for any staff you bring to this new town?

With home prices high, interest rates up and the supply of homes available on the market dwindling – or at best stagnant — access to housing may play a bigger part in future decisions.

Consider this as an example from a story via our sister publication Crain's Grand Rapids Business on electric vehicle battery maker LG Energy Solution on whether to place its North American headquarters in Holland, Mich., where it is expanding operations. LG officials said a lack of housing options in the town of about 35,000 has challenged hiring efforts, with some engineers renting out hotels because they can't find homes in the area.

"I think there is some good work being done in housing, but it continues to be a crisis for us," said Jennifer Owens, president of the economic development group Lakeshore Advantage. "How are we going to continue to help our companies grow if people [who work there] are living farther and farther away because they can't find an affordable place?"

The website Recruitonomics.com wrote in 2022 that the U.S. was short some 3.8 million housing units before COVID-19. It's only gotten worse since then.

"As home prices skyrocket, it gets harder to hire," Sam Kuhn wrote for Recruitonomics. "When teachers, firefighters and nurses are struggling to find affordable places to live, it creates upward pressure on salaries. This is the true impact on hiring, as workers will demand more money to compensate for their higher cost of living."

A plastics collection and recycling project on the Pacific island of Bali is stepping out on its own.

The Alliance to End Plastic Waste has announced that the local government of Jembrana, on Bali — part of Indonesia — has become financially stable enough to operate on its own. The program, part of Project Stop, launched in 2017 as an effort to capture plastics that could escape into the ocean.

Indonesia is the second-largest plastics polluter in the world, after China, with about 1.2 million metric tons of plastic waste each year escaping into the waters. Project Stop was created by the Alliance to End Plastic Waste to develop collection systems in areas with a high level of plastics pollution. Materials supplier Borealis and sustainability resource group Systemiq, through AEPW, have now converted three sites in Indonesia to self-supporting operations, our sister paper Sustainable Plastics writes.

The Corvette was a breakthrough for plastics in automotive when it debuted in 1953 with a fiberglass body and sleek shape that set it apart.

So it only makes sense that one of the biggest plastics toy companies in the world, Lego A/S, would begin model kits of the Corvette to mark its 70th anniversary.

The Lego Corvette that went on sale in July is based on the 1961 C1 model (available in convertible or hard top) and is the company's largest Corvette model to date, says our sister paper Automotive News, with 1,210 pieces.

Lego also sells two takes on the Chevrolet Camaro in plastic brick form.