Kickstart: A balancing act

There's a massive balancing act going on involving, well, mass balance.

PN's Steve Toloken has a story from the American Chemistry Council's recent Innovation and Circularity Summit in Florida, where experts talked about the need to use mass balance to advance chemical recycling but also fears of a backlash from environmental groups and consumers who might accuse the use of it as greenwashing.

Mass balance essentially is a way to track sustainability by mixing virgin and recycled materials in the production stream, including plastics from chemical recycling. That makes it easier to add recycled materials to the mix but doesn't specifically state how much recycled content is in a product. So, a bottle may be made using material from a production stream marked as having 25 percent recycled content, but it's nearly impossible to state for certain how much actual recycled content is in that bottle.

Companies looking to chemical recycling want to see more use of mass balance because they see it as an easier way to open doors to using plastics reclaimed through that process.

Big brand owners who would use the material, however, see it as complicating the story they tell to consumers about their approach to sustainability.

"We need to make sure that we can make that claim to the consumer in a clear way that they understand and we're not going to get labeled greenwashing," Drew Felz, Lego's Washington-based director of government and public affairs, said at the event.

Meanwhile, plastics may play a part in ending debate for another big argument — this time in the home.

Cleana Inc. is a Boston-based startup with a patented acetal hinge on a polypropylene toilet seat that automatically raises and lowers seats and lids. PN's Catherine Kavanaugh writes that the young developers have two versions of the seat. The Cleana Seat is intended for men's toilets in public restrooms and automatically raises between every use (with a handle to lower the seat when needed). The Cleana Home automatically lowers the seat and lid between uses.

The seats do not require batteries or electricity, making them a far cheaper alternative to other systems.

The images and video of a sea otter off the coast of Santa Cruz, Calif., that is stealing surfboards (and taking foam-filled bites off them) seem like a charming encounter with nature. But scientists are warning that it is "not normal" and dangerous to both the animal and humans.

They don't even know why the California sea otter, known as Otter 841, has begun interacting with surfers and their boards in a manner one surfer told NBC News was a "cute encounter at first, but turned aggressive real quick."

"But just because it's not normal doesn't mean it never happens," Tim Tinker, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told The New York Times. Otters can become accustomed to people if they're fed or repeatedly approached by them.

Otter 841's mother likewise had a tendency to get too close to humans, but in her case it was a habit of climbing onto kayaks for a treat, rather than surfboards. She was captured for rehabilitation and gave birth to 841, The Times noted.

Now 841 faces the same prospect as her mother and will be captured and removed for her own safety. That's if they can catch her.