Kickstart: A growing business

As more states legalize marijuana sales, more companies are developing products to tap into the supply chain for that market.

Consider as one case the flexible packaging brand Grove Bags, from Kinzie Advanced Polymers, developed to specifically provide the humidity control and antimicrobial property to maintain oxygen levels for a "perfect cannabis climate."

Co-founder Jack Grover was named to the 2022 "Notables in Manufacturing" list from our sister paper Crain's Cleveland Business.

Grove Bags use a proprietary multilayer film termed TerpLoc to maximize the shelf life of cannabis products.

"Grover's idea took hold because prior medical cannabis was being stored in products repurposed from the food industry," Crain's Cleveland Business writes. "That led him to research polymer packaging science, which in turn led him to engineer ... TerpLoc, which is now used in every state and 60 countries."

Cleveland-based Grove Bags has 25 employees and has won a Dow Packaging Innovation award.

Nominations are now open for our best-known awards: Plastics News' 2023 Best Places to Work and the 2022 Processor of the Year.

Best Places to Work is a survey and awards program that recognizes the best employers in the plastics industry and provides organizations with valuable employee feedback. Companies are evaluated by Best Companies Group, and firms that meet their criteria are named PN's Best Places to Work.

This program is open to both suppliers and processors. The deadline for submissions is Oct. 14. To learn more, visit www.bestplacestoworkplastics.com.

Nominations are also open for 2022 Processor of the Year. That competition is open to all private and public companies or corporate operating divisions engaged in North American plastics processing for at least the past five years. The deadline for nominations is Aug. 31, and the deadline for final submissions is Oct. 1.

There is more information and a link to the nomination form at www.plasticsnews.com/topic/processor-year.

Let's take a moment to remember an artist who used fiberglass, expanded polystyrene, aluminum and steel to recreate common objects on a very large scale.

Claes Oldenburg died July 18 at the age of 90. The artist was at the center of a pop art movement celebrating the ordinary such as a cherry on the tip of a spoon displayed in Minneapolis, oversized shuttlecocks shown in Kansas City and a matchbook and matches that are part of a collection in Barcelona.

In addition to sculpting common items, Oldenburg and his wife and partner in art, Coosje van Bruggen, wanted those sculptures in places where they were accessible to more people.

"We like the idea that the sculptures are not all in, say, New York or someplace — that they're scattered around the cities of America and Europe," Oldenburg told National Public Radio's All Things Considered in 2011. "There's a lot of people you're never going to reach. But we have reached, I think, quite a few people, in all parts of the country."