Kickstart: Let them eat candy

Let's make something clear: Halloween is for fun. It's for oversized decorations and haunted houses and way too much candy. (The exception to candy being small toys or stickers or other items available to kids with food allergies, who use a teal-colored bucket when trick-or-treating.)

It would be awesome if all those wrappers for all those bite-sized candies were also biodegradable or easy to recycle, but we don't live in that world right now. And although the whole "poisoned candy" stories are mostly urban legends, we also don't live in a world where parents or kids want to see houses handing out unwrapped treats.

That doesn't mean you can't make an effort to trick-or-treat a little more sustainably in this imperfect world. Mars Inc., for one example, is offering free recyclable candy bags on its website. Working with New Jersey-based Rubicon Technologies Inc., the bag doubles as a place to put used wrappers. Once you're done with the candy, the bag has a prepaid postage stamp. Drop it in a nearby mailbox to send the wrappers off for recycling, Mars said in a news release.

Rubicon estimates that the "vast majority" of wrappers from 600 million pounds of candy purchased each year in the U.S. end up in landfills. It began its "Trick or Trash" effort in 2019, providing wrapper recycling containers for schools, small businesses and community organizations.

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Lear Corp. is best known as a seating supplier to the auto industry, but its electronics business shouldn't be overlooked, especially with a new contract in hand to exclusively supply the battery disconnect unit on all full-size SUVs and trucks built on GM's Ultium EV platform through 2030.

The Southfield, Mich.-based company will spend $80 million and create "hundreds" of jobs in Michigan, Kurt Nagl from our sister paper Crain's Detroit Business writes.

The systems use plastics in parts such as injection molded connectors and wiring harnesses. In 2021, Lear acquired injection molder M&N Plastics Inc. to beef up its E-Systems business.

Adapting technology for new uses can create some really interesting connections. But linking ear tags for dairy cattle with injection molding improvements is one I didn't expect to run across.

During K 2022, Aismo GmbH, an Austrian startup, came with an idea of using a Bluetooth-enabled tag originally developed to monitor the health of dairy cattle to track key metrics on molding equipment.

"The sensor in the ear tag enables artificial intelligence to be used to discover what is going on. In this way it is possible to tell very early on, for example, whether a cow is ill or even pregnant," CEO Werner Schwarz told Karen Laird of our sister magazine Sustainable Plastics. "In the same way, we thought it should be possible to monitor the performance of an injection molding machine."

The system stands out, he says, because it's so simple. Just glue the sensor to the moving side of a press. You can find more about the project here.