Kickstart: It's wine o'clock for recycling

California has set its sights on liquor and wine — including boxed wine — for its container deposit program.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation Sept. 27 that will add a 10-cent deposit for most wine and spirits containers starting in 2024. While glass bottles may seem easy to drop into the existing recycling system, only about 30 percent is recycled currently vs. 70 percent for packaging that falls into the current deposit program, Plastics News' Steve Toloken writes.

Boxed wines are more complex, though, consisting of flexible inner, rigid spouts and cardboard outer packaging. The bag-in-bottle, or BIB, is also growing in popularity too. The BIB market was estimated to be worth $2 billion globally in 2017 and double within 10 years, according to Future Market Insights. The packaging is gaining use not just in budget wines, but from higher-end winemakers because the bags limit exposure to the air, allowing wines to last longer.

In recognition of the complications of dealing with flexible packaging, spouts and boxes, California will give boxed wine an extra two years before it falls under the deposit program.

The Chicago section of the Society of Plastics Engineers and the Chicago SPE Educational Foundation have donated $25,000 to endow the Patsy and Glenn L. Beall Chicago SPE Scholarship for plastics students at the Pennsylvania College of Technology.

First preference for the scholarship will be given to Penn College students who are residents of Illinois, female, enrolled in their junior or senior year of the plastics and polymer engineering technology and has at least a 3.0 grade point average. Second preference will be for a female student who meets the same qualifications but lives outside Illinois.

SPE also will honor Glenn Beall, a Plastics Hall of Fame member and the first Emeritus Member of SPE's Medical Plastic Division Board, during an Oct. 12 dinner.

Beall was named to the Plastics Hall of Fame in 1997. He received 12 patents while working in the research division of Abbott Laboratories from 1958 to 1968 and another 23 patents while operating his own company, Glenn Beall Engineering Inc.

The dinner in Gurnee, Ill., will be part of an event focused on "hot topics in the medical device industry."

There is going to be a very different vibe at the K 2022 this month compared with the 2019 show.

The world has changed in ways that even the most prescient of business leaders couldn't have predicted just three years ago.

"There was a pandemic, during which lockdowns and multiple travel restrictions brought the risks of globalization forcefully home. The system of established, wide-reaching production and trade networks that ensured an uninterrupted flow of goods, raw materials, money and even workers came to a screeching halt. Shipping bottlenecks played havoc with distribution and supply chains. The risks of the 'just-in-time' manufacturing model became glaringly obvious," writes Karen Laird of our sister paper Sustainable Plastics.

"As a wake-up call, that would have been enough," she continues, but of course 2022 would bring all the issues related to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

All of those issues add to the need for cooperation between companies and countries and makes clear how much needs to be discussed at K.

The new issue of Sustainable Plastics looks at the issues facing K as it marks its 70th anniversary this year. It's free to download from sustainableplastics.com.