Kickstart: From the K show to the flower show

Every trade show features hundreds (if not thousands) of new product introductions and displays. It's hard to determine just how many of those translate into new products on the marketplace.

Well, here's one.

Epoca SpA, an Italian maker and designer of garden and household items, saw DSM's Akulon Repurposed line of nylon made from recycled, disused commercial fishing nets at K 2022 in Düsseldorf, Germany, almost a year ago.

The material fit right in with Epoca's plans to have 50 percent of its gardening products made using recycled materials by 2030, our sister paper Sustainable Plastics writes.

It now has a line of garden products on the market, Sealove, made with the material now produced by Envalior, the joint venture of DSM's engineering materials business and Lanxess' high-performance materials business.

Epoca isn't the only gardening business with new recycled-content products.

In Oakland, Calif., Back to the Roots, an organic gardening brand, will begin selling its organic soil mix using bags made of 100 percent post-consumer recycled plastics in 2024.

ProAmpac worked with Back to the Roots on the project. The company has used recycled material and post-consumer resin in seed mix packaging, hydroponic grow kits and seed starting trays in the past.

"Bringing recycled content into the soil category, however, has been a tough challenge given the unique environmental demands on the packaging," ProAmpac officials said in a news release.

"When we think about reducing the footprint of our soil packaging, we go back to the fundamentals we learned in elementary school: reduce, reuse and recycle. This is just the start of our journey towards a more sustainable soil category," said Alejandro Velez, Back to the Roots co-CEO. "We ultimately envision a world where our community can bring back their own reusable totes into stores to fill up with soil year after year after year; but in the meantime, we want to reduce and recycle. Each bag we sell should use less and less drilled oil/gas and virgin plastic."

Will 3D printing help German trains run more efficiently? (As if German trains weren't already efficient.)

Essentium Inc., an industrial additive manufacturer based in Pflugerville, Texas, announced it is working with Germany's national rail company, Deutsche Bahn, to supply on-demand 3D printing for tools and parts. Initially there will be a library of 1,000 parts that can be produced as needed, with plans to increase that to 10,000 parts by 2030.

That means that the company will be able to do quick repairs without waiting for replacement parts to be delivered from remote locations.

The Essentium High Speed Extrusion printing platform will use the company's flame-retardant 9085 and HTN-CF25 thermoplastics.