Kickstart: Clearly communicating about sustainability

Think of this as a variation on the topic of trees falling in forests with no one to hear them: Can your company be as sustainable as possible if your employees don't know what green steps you're taking?

During the Greater Cleveland Partnership Sustainability Summit Jan. 23, Walter Ripple, Avient Corp.'s vice president of sustainability, said the company's early efforts went underappreciated and unnoticed.

"It was a real mess for our employees who knew all these great things [we were] doing around sustainability," Ripple said about efforts to get buy-in from such a large and diverse company, as our sister paper Crain's Cleveland Business reported from the event.

"The other thing is that we weren't sharing best practices throughout the organization," he said.

To really make a difference, the Avon Lake, Ohio-based compounder and concentrates company had to learn to speak as one, he said. Avient started a sustainability council with leaders from each of its business units in 2019.

"It created not only communication but full engagement throughout the organization, all the way to our executive team and across all our functions. It really helped to accelerate all of our efforts around sustainability," Ripple said.

You can find more coverage of the event here.

A 45-foot boat may not be the biggest marine craft on the water, but it is a big breakthrough in sustainability, according to materials supplier Arkema, researchers from CCNB-INNOV in New Brunswick and Canadian boat builder DJ Marine.

The boat made with Arkema's Elium-brand liquid acrylic thermoplastic resin is fully recyclable, leading the way "for further sustainability in boat building." CCNB-INNOV said it used vacuum infusion molding to produce the boat's hull.

Elium, which replaces liquid thermoset in fiberglass and other composites, has gone into wind turbine blades, sailboats and hydrogen tanks. The fishing boat is the largest vessel ever made using the thermoplastic and "paves the way for even larger boats" to be made of the recyclable material.

The boat is docked in Pointe-Sapin, New Brunswick.

Plastic clips are at the center of a recall of nearly 2 million Ford Explorers, but the blame is being placed on "improper assembly or repair" rather than the components themselves.

The recall report from Ford Motor Co. to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration covers 2011-19 model year explorers.

The problem involves A-pillar trim on the vehicles that can become loose at high speeds because of problems with the plastic clips' assembly. Ford told NHTSA it was aware of more than 14,300 warranty claims from the issue, although there have been no reports of accidents or injuries, our sister paper Automotive News writes.

The NHTSA paperwork lists "ABC Technologies — Windsor Mold Group" as the clip supplier. Toronto-based ABC acquired Windsor Mold in 2022.