Kickstart: Adding bottle bill deposits for wine, liquor

California lawmakers who passed the country's toughest plastics pollution and recycling law earlier this year may add another set of containers to their legislation: wine and liquor bottles.

California Senate President Pro Tem Toni G. Atkins, D-San Diego, co-wrote SB-1013 with Bill Dodd, a Democrat representing the California wine country of Napa and Sonoma counties, signalling that the wine industry is open to the idea.

The bill passed the senate in late May and awaits action in the assembly.

While the bulk of wine and liquor is packaged in glass, PET is used for single-serve liquor bottles.

Dustin Gardiner of the San Francisco Chronicle writes that wine makers want more glass bottles in the recycling stream so they can use more recycled material.

"Frankly, it's long overdue," Dodd told Gardiner. "The soft drink companies have been doing this, the beer companies have been doing this."

California won't be the first to add a bottle bill for wine and liquor. Maine has had deposits for wine and liquor bottles since 2015 and added a 5-cent deposit on plastic mini bottles in 2019.

When Michelin rolled out the Tweel concept tire at the 2005 North American International Auto Show, it was seen as having limited commercial uses.

But the Tweel — an airless tire that replaces traditional rubber structure with hard polyurethane structure and flexible PU spokes — now has a dedicated manufacturing plant in South Carolina and generates $25 million in sales each year. It is used on lawn tractors, golf carts, construction vehicles and other off-road vehicles.

Its inventors, Tim Rhyne and Steve Cron, just won the Charles Goodyear Medal, the highest award given by the American Chemical Society Rubber Division.

As Rhyne and Cron told Bruce Meyer of our sister paper Rubber News, the Tweel's success was nothing they expected, and their own honors seem just as unlikely.

"It's just what we did," Cron said. "Everybody else is doing good work, too. It doesn't seem like we did anything other than just doing our jobs."

Could a love for speed unlock a love for science, technology, engineering and math for girls?

ABB Group, a maker of industrial products including robots and auxiliary equipment for the plastics industry, is hosting girls at Formula E events — the electric vehicle racing division for Formula 1 racing — in the Girls On Track initiative, a program started by Formula 1 in 2019. (Materials company Sabic recently signed on to be the title sponsor of the London E-Prix on July 30 and 31.)

The idea, ABB and Formula 1 officials said in a video posted on its website and in social media, is to connect with girls while they're still young so they can see how sports and STEM fields can combine.

"They come and they spend a day with us and we allow them to access all parts of our business," Hannah Brown, chief of staff for Formula E, says.