Kickstart: Not enough kazoos

An attempt to set a new world record for the largest ensemble of kazoo players may have fallen well short of its goal, but there was still a certain buzz around the effort.

The city of Macon, Ga., had a judge from the Guinness Book of World Records on hand to try to beat the record for the number of people playing kazoos together, but only managed to draw 1,780 on March 28. The record, set in London in 2011, is 5,190. Rick Hubbard, whose Beaufort, S.C.-based Kazoobie Kazoos is the only U.S. manufacturer of the instrument, told NPR he's been trying to reclaim the world record for the U.S. ever since then.

Macon would have been an appropriate location. The city claims to be the birthplace of the kazoo, invented in the late 1840s by a former enslaved man, Alabama Vest, who worked with clockmaker Thaddeus von Clegg to develop the instrument. (Macon's claim of being home to the kazoo is contested by at least two other cities.)

Thermoformer CMI Plastics Inc. is using the power of the sun to supply half the power needed at its plant in Ayden, N.C.

The packaging company worked with Pisgah Energy to design, develop and install a rooftop solar project that adds to the facility's environmental improvements.

Every year the new system is in operation, the solar array will offset the equivalent energy usage of 90 homes, Pisgah Energy said in a news release. The solar project joins an expansion that began in 2023 at CMI that included an investment in additional on-site recycling operations.

A cleanup of millions of plastic pellets that spilled from a cargo ship that was damaged when it collided with a tanker off the coast of England is underway in the United Kingdom. And it involves — as would seem appropriate for anyone who keeps a neat house — a vacuum cleaner.

The equipment being used on beaches in Norfolk is not your normal Hoover, of course. Oracle Environmental Services is sweeping beaches with special industrial systems.

"We are glad that we are able to assist in the cleanup effort of pre-production plastic pellets," Jon Burton, managing director from Oracle, said in a release from the Borough Council of King's Lynn and West Norfolk. "The cleanup will remove these potentially environmentally harmful microplastics from this environmentally sensitive area, protecting the local wildlife and reducing the wider environmental impact."

The initial environmental response to the spilled plastics centered on clumps of burned material found after the March 10 incident in which the cargo ship Solong struck the tanker Stena Immaculate in the North Sea.

Borough council officials said crews have done "an incredible job" finding the larger plastic waste. With migrating seabirds and rising tides returning to the beaches, however, workers are now emphasizing the tedious process of recovering smaller pellets.