Kickstart: The new language of future sustainability

Expect to expand your vocabulary as the plastics industry adapts to a new world of tracking, counting and reducing carbon emissions.

European firms are at the front of the transition currently as regional rules call for firms to address their carbon footprint, Karen Laird, the editor of our sister magazine Sustainable Plastics, said in the July Sustainable Plastics Live webcast.

The first two issues companies must tackle are Scope 1 emissions — greenhouse gas emissions that occur from sources controlled or owned by a company, coming from equipment they operate — and Scope 2 emissions covering indirect GHG emissions, such as those from the source of electricity, steam, heating or cooling.

Scope 3 is harder for individual companies to control, since it involves emissions from elsewhere in the supply chain.

"Apart from the fact that it's absolutely essential that this happen, it's also an added burden. It's a lot of work," she said. "I talk to a lot of people who say ... they're hiring people to do this and it's taking far longer than I ever thought it would. You could say its extra work for the companies, but they're going to have to do it anyway."

The rising push to reduce the carbon footprint of plastics is prompting leading companies to invest in alternatives like carbon capture programs.

"It's a very interesting area and it's one that's slowly also becoming reality. It sounds all very science fiction like to say we can make plastic from thin air, but there are plastics companies that are trying to do that," she said.

It's a very complicated story, and for more details, Plastics News subscribers can catch the full conversation here.

Boris Johnson may be on his way out as the prime minister in the United Kingdom, but his time as leader of the nation's Conservative Party has generated some plastics headlines.

Even prior to coming into the national office in 2019, when he was London's mayor, Johnson ruffled feathers in the plastics industry. In 2011, he said he wanted to ban free plastic retail bags from the capital before the start of the 2012 Olympics.

Single-use plastics also were the subject of a minor kerfuffle when Johnson was campaigning in 2019, as one aide handed him a drink in a single-use container. Another aide quickly took it away from him, telling him "no disposable cups" for the sake of optics.

When he took office as the prime minister, it was under the wary eye of the U.K.'s Chemical Industries Association, which had been calling for a cautious approach to Brexit, the country's departure from the European Union.

And then just in October, Johnson frustrated the industry during an Oct. 25 event in which he said that Brits need to cut back on plastics use and not expect recycling to be the answer.

Recycling Association CEO Simon Ellin, speaking on BBC's World at One program at that time, said that the comments were "very disappointing. I think he's completely lost the plastics plot."

In 1962, San Diego barber Willie Morrow received a gift from a friend who had just visited Nigeria: a wooden comb with long tines designed for curly hair.

Morrow found it was perfect for Black Americans' adoption of traditional hair styles. After tinkering with it, he developed his own version, first using wood then adopting plastic so it could be mass produced.

The Afro pick was quickly adopted by barber shops, salons and regular customers. At its height, Morrow was selling 12,000 picks a week, The New York Times writes.

Morrow died June 22 at the age of 82.

His work on Black hairstyles didn't stop at the Afro. He helped the U.S. Department of Defense train barbers on how to cut Black hair. He developed a straightening product he termed "California Curl" in the 1970s that would be marketed by another company as Jheri curl.

Beyond that, he owned a newspaper and radio station in San Diego and wrote more than a dozen books, including a history of Black hair care in the United States.