Kickstart: Looking for little wins during treaty talks

The big plastics treaty talks in Nairobi, Kenya, this month failed to meet hopes of advancing a global approach to sustainable plastics.

As PN's Steve Toloken wrote this week, some groups — including the Center for International Environmental Law — considered the meetings at United Nations headquarters in Nairobi a "relative failure" as environmental groups and members of the "high-ambition coalition" countries faced off against fossil fuel-producing nations that wanted to slow any big changes.

As a result, treaty negotiations likely won't be as advanced for the next series of talks, set for April in Ottawa, Ontario.

But there were some small advances in sustainability in Kenya.

Germany announced during the meeting that it has joined the Ocean Conservancy's Global Ghost Gear Initiative to focus on the biggest contributor to ocean plastics: abandoned fishing gear.

Fishing gear represents 86 percent of floating plastics by weight in ocean currents, according to the initiative, Beatriz Santos from our sister paper Sustainable Plastics writes. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that ghost gear is responsible for up to a 30 percent decline in some fish stocks.

Germany joins a group that includes the U.S., Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Norway and the United Kingdom. It has pledged to contribute 100,000 euros ($109,000) annually to support GGGI projects.

3D printing is going to the moon.

Italy-based CRP Techology srl announced Nov. 21 it has signed on to produce functional parts for Orbital Space's Lunaris Moon Mission using the powder bed fusion process in Windform SLS composite materials.

Orbital Space is a private aerospace company based in the United Arab Emirates that aims to be a leader in space exploration for Arabic countries in the Persian Gulf. It says it will develop a lunar rover and send it to the moon in 2024.

"I'm sure we could play a pivotal role in making the Lunaris Moon Mission a reality," Franco Cevolini, CEO and chief technology officer at CRP Technology, said in a news release.

The return of vinyl records has led to a new demand for the equipment to play them on.

Our sister paper Crain's Cleveland Business writes that the North American offices of Japan's Audio-Technica — a maker of turntables, microphones and earphones — has added manufacturing capacity in China and staff in the U.S. to keep up with demand for the equipment.

The big push in demand came in 2020 as people stuck at home began looking at new (or old) entertainment options. Vinyl records won over converts and demand rose, Kurt Van Scoy, Audio-Technica's U.S. vice president of products, business alliance and marketing, told Crain's Cleveland.

No one, including Audio-Technica, is sure whether vinyl is back to stay, so the company is conservative in its growth plans. Currently, Van Scoy said, about 20 million U.S. households have record players vs. 70 million in the 1970s.