Kickstart: More plastics, less glamour for your Roman holiday

If you want to toss a coin into Rome's Trevi Fountain during the next few months, then you'll have to clear a clear plastic barrier and aim for a small fiberglass pool that's been pressed into service for tourists.

Officials in Rome just began a massive cleaning project at the 300-year-old fountain to prepare it for a Jubilee celebration for both Rome and Vatican City in 2025. To try to appease tourists wanting to toss a coin over their shoulder into the fountain — a gesture that is supposed to guarantee a return to the city that tourists have widely adopted as part of a routine visit — the city placed a small replacement pool in front of the fountain, behind a plastic wall.

But the pool itself is small and unimpressive, its shell enclosed only in plywood sheets. It is also, as can be seen in photos and video from the site, hard to hit.

While far from grand, the pool serves a dual purpose: It allows the city to keep collecting coins — the Catholic charity Caritas receives about $1.6 million per year via the tradition — and city officials told CNN that workers are less likely to be hit while on the job.

Students at Ohio's Barberton City Schools will soon be able to tap into polymer education from kindergarten to 12th grade as the school district teams up with the Sustainable Polymers Tech Hub based in nearby Akron.

"There are 31 tech hubs in the U.S., and every state has their version of an innovation hub," Josh Gordon of the Barberton Community Foundation told our sister paper Crain's Cleveland Business. "Barberton is the first school system in the country to have a program aligned with a tech hub. I don't know how that's true, but whenever someone is the first and only, it's a big deal."

A close link between the schools and an industry in need of a future workforce makes a lot of sense. The median household income in Barberton is a little less than $50,000 a year, well below Ohio's statewide median income of $67,000.

The hub, school and community backers will develop a curriculum that introduces younger students to the basics of polymers while high school students can tap into increased information about materials, specific processes such as injection molding and industrial operations such as lean manufacturing, Gordon said.

Riverdale Global LLC has closed the loop on its liquid color vessel cleaning process at its High Point, N.C., plant, which should reduce its water demands by 250,000 gallons annually.

The process, developed in-house, sees containers for the liquid color go through an eight-minute pressure wash cycle in an enclosed washing station. Water drained after cleaning goes through a series of filtration tanks to separate the liquid from the solids until it's clean enough to be used to clean the next series of vessels. None of the water ends up in the community's wastewater stream.