Kickstart: Camping with family and measuring plastic in the water

A lot of us have joined with family on work trips. It can be a great way to turn that business travel into a small adventure.

Well-known plastics pollution researcher and University of Georgia professor Jenna Jambeck has taken it up a few steps and probably has all of us beat.

Jambeck, her husband and their two kids are spending three weeks in a 19-foot camper trailer traveling the Mississippi River as part of her work with the Mississippi River Plastic Pollution Initiative.

She's documenting it in this personal blog, where she also delves into how as a kid she tried to find role models for the kind of scientific researcher she wanted to be and her own wonderings about how to mesh that future career with a future family.

The Mississippi River initiative she's working on is a project of the National Geographic Society, the United Nations Environment Programme and the University of Georgia to build a citizen network documenting pollution along the river and feed that data into the Marine Debris Tracker app.

If you're not familiar with Jambeck, she's a National Geographic fellow and a co-author of some seminal papers on plastics in the marine environment. She regularly speaks at conferences and has testified before Congress.

And, like me, she's turned to camping in the pandemic, although my forays have been more modest with a tent in West Virginia. Sounds like she and her family will have a great time.

3D printing firm Proto Labs Inc. celebrated Earth Day on April 22 by unveiling a solar array on top of its Plymouth, Minn., factory, where it machines molds for its injection molding services.

The company installed over 1,800 solar panels, covering most of the rooftop of the facility and generating 711 kilowatts of power.

That's about 20 percent of what the plant and its 330 workers need, and the company says it will offset 1.3 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions annually.

It's part of other work like reducing scrap rates, installing higher-efficiency resin dryers and having employees create a sustainability charter.

Material shortages and tight supplies continued to take up our news coverage last week.

This story from Catherine Kavanaugh shows potentially the worst of it, temporary layoffs of 80-100 workers being contemplated at one Pennsylvania plastics firm.

And Frank Esposito had this coverage of Dow's quarterly earnings, where the resin giant reported strong financial results but also noted that tight inventories continued. It said all of its production units impacted by the Texas winter storms are now back online, boding well for the future.

Shortages of plastics are getting plenty of mainstream business news coverage as well, like this article on Whirlpool adjusting production lines and complaining that it can't get any visibility on pricing for plastics and microchips.

It's tricky to manage and no one wants to see shortages of goods you need. But on the other side, you could argue problems from a shortage of material is a better problem for the economy as a whole than layoffs and cutbacks from a lack of demand.

It's better to have stronger underlying fundamentals, as Catherine notes in this piece on machinery makers reporting good demand in the industry.