Kickstart: My Earth Day force majeure — writing about reusables

Tomorrow is Earth Day. For those of us who work around plastics, we're inundated with news about the material: The good it plays in improving lives and the bad we have yet to effectively deal with, like recycling and pollution.

If you're like me, you may be approaching Earth Day feeling a little overwhelmed by plastic waste, by our more existential threats like climate change, by that in-home composting project that fell by the wayside in the pandemic and, oh yeah, by COVID-19 itself.

So, as a result, I'm going to evoke newsletter writer's privilege — or to borrow an industry term we all know, I'm declaring force majeure to put one of my ideas in front of everyone — and suggest we break Earth Day 2021 into a bite-sized nugget.

Tomorrow, let's focus on reusable packaging as one step to take.

The NGO Upstream does a lot of work around reusable packaging models in stores and in cities, and they include examples of how stores have moved toward reusables. They discuss the problems of single-use packaging of any material and suggest changes we can all make in our lives.

More on the big picture, reusables are a key part of the work coming from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and the U.S. Plastics Pact. And finally, if you're looking for a deep dive life cycle assessment of single-use products, take a look at this U.N. study.

OK, maybe you're not looking for that deep dive into an LCA. Can't blame you! That was the Plastics News reporter in me coming out.

But thanks for considering reusables on your Earth Day!

Staying on attempts to reduce our use of virgin materials, the magazine Fast Company had an interesting look this week at fashion retailer Everlane and its 2018 pledge to eliminate all virgin plastic from its products by 2021. Think buttons, sneaker soles and spandex.

The company has gotten 90 percent of the way there, but that last mile, that last 10 percent, is proving to be quite a challenge.

The company switched 45 different materials away from plastic or they used recycled plastic. But the problem is the performance attributes they need in some products. They have yet to find recycled plastic versions of some fibers that can do the job, for example.

The article also talks about how switching to natural materials like organic cotton isn't the no-brainer it might seem to be, with the environmental impacts from growing cotton.

It's pushed the company to try to help create materials and infrastructure that don't yet exist. As one start, on Earth Day it's announcing $100,000 toward a contest for ideas to help it reach its goal of "No New Plastic."

Finally, one of the things that we've worked hard at over the years at Plastics News is building up a network of correspondents around the world, since this industry is extremely global.

It allowed us to have on-the-ground coverage last week of the opening of the first major plastics trade show to happen since the pandemic started over a year ago.

Chinaplas had its four-day run April 13-16, drawing what organizers said was 152,000 visitors to the exhibition grounds in Shenzhen.

But this being a time of a global pandemic, any of those visitors who came from outside mainland China had to quarantine in a hotel for two weeks before they could attend the show.

There weren't many, but our China-based reporter Rebecca Kanthor wrote this article on three people who decided attending the trade show was worth 14 days of self-isolation.

For one of them, it was his fourth two-week quarantine to come to China for business in the last 11 months. The reviews were mixed: Two seem to manage pretty well, but one person described it like being in jail. I think he clearly had the worst hotel of the three.