Kickstart: Recycling and DIY

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Tomorrow's home improvement project tools may rely on yesterday's single-use plastics.

Stanley Black & Decker announced Oct. 11 that it will use chemically recycled Tritan Renew materials from Eastman Chemical Co. in its new Reviva powertool line under the Black + Decker brand.

Using Tritan Renew, which will source 50 percent of its material from recycled content, will allow the Reviva brand to divert "the weight of more than 10 million single-use plastic bottles" into new products "to meet the needs of a new generation of eco-conscious consumers," the company said in a news release.

In addition to plastics on the power tools, Stanley Black & Decker said the tools will be packaged in curbside recyclable boxes that double as storage containers.

Dow Inc. may not have a booth at K 2022, but it is still emphasizing many of the same topics that its competitors will discuss at the trade show in Düsseldorf, Germany, starting in a week. Specifically, the need to decarbonize.

The Midland, Mich.-based materials company recently invited the press — including Karen Laird from our sister paper Sustainable Plastics — to check out the first stages of its efforts to reduce emissions from its massive Terneuzen, Netherlands, site.

Dow first announced its "flagship" effort at the site in 2021. Its road map, Karen writes, calls for the Terneuzen facility to reduce some 1.4 million metric tons of carbon emissions in the first phase of the work. That's the equivalent to the annual emissions from more than 300,000 cars. That will require using clean hydrogen to fire steam crackers rather than natural gas.

What Dow doesn't want to do, executives said, is to merely capture and store the carbon, at least in the long term.

You can find the full report from Karen here.

Rising interest rates may have cooled the mergers and acquisitions side of the plastics industry lately, but buying and selling hasn't completely stopped.

Brian Flynn, a director of investment firm William Blair, said at the recent Plastics Caps & Closures conference, organized by Plastics News, that M&A values remain high, even if they're not historic. And packaging has been showing its resilience, Flynn said, because people still need food and medical packaging, regardless of macroeconomic trends, as PN's Jim Johnson writes.

Even those buyers taking a break currently will be looking for the right deals and the right time to make those deals.

"Packaging M&A still will be active," Flynn said. "Will it be the high-flying multiples of before? Probably not … [but] looking at the buyer community overall, there still is a lot of capital on the sideline."