Kickstart: A bigger school for packaging

Michigan State University's School of Packaging just completed a $10 million "comprehensive renovation" in April 2023. Now it has announced a planned $25 million "major expansion" that will double the size of its building and increase research capacity, creating space for more faculty and graduate students.

Private donations from individuals and companies — among them Ring Container Technologies and Amcor — are helping finance the expansion that was approved by officials for the East Lansing, Mich.-based university on Feb. 2.

Part of MSU's College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, the School of Packaging says it is the largest packaging studies program in the country with 600 students in both undergraduate and graduate programs and that it provides the only Ph.D. program in packaging in the U.S.

"This expansion will create world-renowned sustainability research spaces so that we can expand our faculty in this critical area," said Matthew Daum, the school's director, in a news release. "We're particularly excited this addition will allow us to bring in more graduate students to meet industry demand."

The expansion is set to begin in 2025.

Sustainability has, of course, been a big topic in the plastics industry for some time. It seems like large, national publications have also tuned in to the discussion.

Both The New York Times and Washington Post have published stories this week on the topic, bringing the topic to a larger audience. Post reporter Evan Halper focused on outreach from the plastics industry, seeking to share its story via the PlastiVan program from the Society of Plastics Engineers. The Times, meanwhile, looked at California's bag ban, which ended up creating a bigger demand for heavy-duty, reusable bags, resulting in more plastics being used in the state.

The Post's story featuring PlastiVan has a headline that isn't exactly wrong and falls a bit into clickbait territory — "The plastics industry would like a word with your kids" — although it does go on to refer to the SPE program as "more nuanced" than other pro-industry efforts.

For the record, PN has covered PlastiVan since the 1990s. PN's Steve Toloken wrote about California's bag ban well before voters approved it in 2014. Even the people quoted in the stories are familiar names from continuing coverage in PN, among them Eve Vitale from SPE, Ross Eisenberg of the American Chemistry Council, Jan Dell of The Last Beach Cleanup and Judith Enck of Beyond Plastics.

One other story from the New York Times in the past few days does echo a plastics industry talking point, however. In a story about the sudden pop culture growth of the Stanley Tumbler, reporter Hirocho Tabuchi points out that the reusable cup and its competitors are only sustainable if you buy a limited number of them and use them for a very, very, very long time.

"The point of a reusable mug is that, theoretically, you only need one. And you're replacing dozens or even hundreds of single-use cups with that one reusable mug," Sandra Goldmark of Columbia University's Climate School told the Times. To make up for buying multiple cups, "you've got a lot of water drinking to do" to make up for the carbon footprint.