Kickstart: A booth crawl for sunglasses

Almost anyone can put together a pub crawl. At NPE2024, machinery maker Arburg and a three of its partners joined forces for a booth crawl that sees attendees visiting companies in both the West and South halls to collect all the elements for a pair of sunglasses, lanyard and case.

"This is how we demonstrate our expertise in collaboration and turnkey solutions," Guido Frohnhaus of Arburg told Plastics News' Catherine Kavanaugh for a story in today's PN special issue from NPE.

Arburg — like many of the big machinery companies — has made giveaways on the floor at other trade shows. Typically those are items produced fully within its own booth.

For the NPE sunglasses, Arburg is using automated assembly for the two components of the main part of the sunglasses at Booth W3743. For the matching temples, visitors head to Kistler Instrument Corp. at W3321.

In the South Hall, Shin-Etsu Silicones of America Inc. has lanyards at Booth S26055, while toolmaker Adler Industrial Solutions has cases at S31151.

And one good thing about this giveaway: It's small enough so you won't have to worry about whether it's too big to fit in your luggage for the trip home.

Kansas City, Mo., says its $8.5 million investment in rolling trash bins for residential collection will help keep critters out of garbage bags and streets cleaner. But there are also worries the investment could disincentivize recycling.

Until 2004, Kansas City had no limits on its residential garbage collection. Then the city set up a municipal recycling system with a goal of diverting 80 percent of items headed to the landfill, The Kansas City Beacon writes. To encourage recycling, residents were limited to two bags of trash per household (unless they paid extra for overflow), but had unlimited access to free recycling. With bins, the only limit is what fits inside.

The city is still investing in both recycling and compost facilities for residents, but Kechia Smith, director of environmental justice and organizational growth at the nonprofit Bridging the Gap, told The Beacon that residents may just give up on recycling because there are so many rules about what is accepted.

"You give me a trash cart, and now I don't necessarily have to think about recycling," she told The Beacon. "You may make it a little easier for people just to say, 'Oh, I won't do it at all.'"

Recycled PET made a statement at the Met Gala fashion event May 6 as singer and actress Janelle Monáe wore a gown made by Vera Wang featuring clear plastic bottles hand-molded to resemble flower petals, Wang noted on social media.

It was one of only a few gowns to lean into a sustainability angle to represent the theme from J.G. Ballard's short story The Garden of Time, Elle.com noted.

While a few celebrities and designers opted to update vintage clothes — or use scrap fabric from past projects — Elle wrote that too many embraced plastics in the form of sequins that "will be littering the planet for literally thousands of years, especially since they're so prone to falling off garments."