Kickstart: Plastics, the Kentucky Derby and 'the longest shot'

You don’t have to be a fan of horse racing to have heard the news this weekend when Rich Strike, facing 80-to-1 odds of winning, came out of nowhere to win the Kentucky Derby May 7.

The horse wasn’t even expected to race and was only picked for the Derby a day earlier when the owner of another horse had to pull out, opening a spot at the starting gate. Rich Strike was barely mentioned in the broadcast of the race until the final strides, when he pulled ahead of two favorites.

"Oh my goodness," Larry Collmus said in calling the race for NBC. "The longest shot has won the Kentucky Derby."

The inspiring win from out of nowhere turns out to have a plastics angle. Rich Strike has been racing recently at Turfway Park in Florence, Ky., a facility that uses a synthetic track surface that has been “barely embraced” and called “plastic” as a derogatory term, as the New York Times’ Joe Drape phrased it.

Synthetic tracks have wax-coated surfaces made of rubber, silica sand and synthetic fibers. Polytrack, the biggest maker of synthetic tracks, uses polypropylene. Its competitor Tapeta has not disclosed what plastic material it uses.

The tracks have the advantage of having a surface that can stand up to more extreme conditions while also being safer for horses. But, as Drape wrote, some traditional race fans see the tracks as leading to inflated race speed, so they dismissed Rich Strike as not being a serious contender for the Derby.

At this point, only about five horse racing venues in the U.S. use a synthetic surface. It may be interesting to watch if Rich Strike’s success improves the odds of more facilities embracing it.

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Ineos missed out on its $5.5 billion bid to buy English professional soccer team Chelsea FC, but that doesn't sever the link between plastics and professional soccer.

To start, the group that was selected to buy Chelsea is led by Dodgers part-owner Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital, the investment firm that owns blow molder Pretium Packaging. (Chelsea FC was up for sale because ownership was removed from a Russian oligarch due to sanctions related to Russia's invasion of Ukraine).

Beyond investment financing, there's another connection with a former player for top European teams.

On May 5, Paris-based GFBiochemicals, a supplier of bio-based levulinic acid as replacements for traditional plasticizers, said it had named co-founder Mathieu Flamini as its CEO as it also announced it had raised 15 milllion euros ($15.8 million) in financing to support its growth.

Flamini is a former professional soccer player who, between 2003 and 2019, played for France's Marseille, the English teams Arsenal and Crystal Palace, Italy's AC Milan and Spain's Getafe.

During that same time, he and GFBiochemicals co-founder Pasquale Granata were looking at ways they could participate in improving sustainability, with an emphasis on using levulinic acid.

"A football career is made of ups and downs. To me, [the research for GFBiochemicals] was an escape," he told The Sun in 2015. "It cleared my mind and helped me to think about something different. And it was something intellectually challenging, too."

Discussions about the circular economy typically focus on packaging, but a Dutch effort is concentrating on creating a robust system to retrieve and turn marine rope back into more rope.

The memorandum of understanding between Teho EuRope BV's Teho Ropes business and PCP BV focuses on recycling of end-of-life mooring ropes used in shipping, our sister paper Sustainable Plastics writes.

Synthetic mooring ropes are hard to recycle because they're made of a mix of polymers. But the companies are developing ways to use the end-of-life ropes in a recycling program that combines plastic waste with bio-based materials.