Kickstart: Criminal plastics investigations

A Ph.D. candidate in the United Kingdom wants to know if the overuse of plastics during police investigations is downright criminal. (Cue the sunglasses and Roger Daltry scream from CSI: Miami at this point.)

This isn't just a parody of crime scene investigation TV shows. Becci Henderson, a crime scene technician in the United Kingdom for more than 20 years who is now working on her doctorate at the University of Portsmouth in England, says that in two months of cataloging plastic use at crime scenes for her study, investigators used an average of 55 grams of plastics at each site.

"At just one job I generated more than 2 kilograms of waste, which all went in the bin and a lot of it was unused," she said in a news release from the university. "We often can't recycle or reuse the plastic so we need to look at reducing it at source."

Obviously there are elements of plastics that have to be used at crime scenes to protect evidence, but there may be ways to tweak evidence kits to reduce the amount of plastics used, Henderson said.

"For example, swabs are too long," she said. "They were originally manufactured for medical use and could be redesigned for forensic work."

The number of jobs in the U.S. is up, but wages are not. Inflation is continuing to push prices higher, but not at the rapid pace seen in 2022. Retail sales are up, but each dollar buys less.

That's a lot of data to consider for the U.S. economy in just a few short months of 2023, says Plastics News Economics Editor Bill Wood in this month's Numbers That Matter column.

"Any gains in workers' paychecks are being far outpaced by the rise in the price of groceries and rent," he writes. "This is unsustainable in the long run, but how much longer can it persist?"

New data out in 2023 represents numbers that he has never seen before, Bill writes, and it's easy to get caught up in the drama related to them rather than the reality of running businesses day to day.

The plastics industry is "deep and diverse," Bill adds, and making any economic forecast will remain complex in the coming months.

This story from our sister publication Rubber News comes from the rubber side of the aisle rather than plastics, but still worth a read if you have the time.

Whitney Luckett, president and owner of rubber supplier Simko North America, and her husband, Marc, were quick to sponsor Ukrainian refugees after the Russian invasion of Ukraine nearly a year ago, with Yana Malyk and her daughters joining them in Colorado Springs, Colo.

And recently, Malyk has worked with the Luckett's to create the nonprofit Ukraine Power to provide generators and heaters to residential areas of Ukraine to aid those still at home, where power infrastructure has been badly damaged during the war.

"Luckett and Malyk knew they needed to help the people of Ukraine more directly, especially as colder climates were closing in and people would be without power in the harsh winters of Ukraine," Sam Cottrill from Rubber News writes. “’[Yana] said, maybe we can save more lives if we could take generators to Ukraine,’ Luckett said.”

You can find the whole story here and connect with Ukraine Power at ukrainepower.org.