Kickstart: One sustainable PC ring to rule them all

A plastic alternative to chain mail originally used in the film version of The Lord of the Rings trilogy has made its way from high fantasy to high-end interior design and now is about become more sustainable.

Kaynemaile announced June 6 that it was moving the bulk of its material from standard virgin polycarbonate to Covestro's Makrolon RE brand PC, made using recycled plastics. Kaynemaile showed off the RE8 architectural mesh during the American Institute of Architects' conference in San Francisco earlier this month.

Kaynemaile is made up of a series of interconnected rings, similar to flexible armor made of metal rings, but made of plastic and much lighter. When filmmaker Peter Jackson was making The Lord of the Rings movies in New Zealand, he tapped art director Kayne Horsham to come up with an alternative.

Horsham developed a system using polypropylene rings that had to be connected by hand — a process that took more than a year. (The actor Viggo Mortensen came up with the name "Kaynemail" for the final product.) You can see a brief behind-the-scenes video of the mail being made here.

After the film, Horsham did some further development to create an automated process to produce sheets of the mail using PC, and it was taken up by architects to highlight interior and exterior design options. It has been used at the Dubai Exhibition Center, at a Silicon Valley office complex, a parking garage in Atlanta and the White Castle headquarters in Columbus, Ohio.

Connecticut is about to require recycled content in bottles, joining a handful of other U.S. states.

PN's Steve Toloken writes that Gov. Ned Lamont has spoken in favor of similar proposals in the past but hasn't said if he will sign the bill setting a target of 25 percent recycled content by 2027. The bill will cover all the containers in the state's bottle bill, including PET bottles for soft drinks, water and other beverages. The level would increase to 30 percent recycled content by 2032.

Only a few other states — California the most prominent — have other recycled-content requirements.

But, of course, the U.S. isn't alone. The European Union is focused on 30 percent recycled content by 2030 in plastic packaging. Canada is looking at a phased-in process to increase recycled content starting in 2026.

And in Australia, PN correspondent Kate Tilley writes that the managing director of Pact Group Ltd. is calling on the national government there to "introduce regulations" for recycled content in packaging.

Meanwhile, a recycling project in San Francisco is garnering criticism following reports that it has spent more than $3.6 million in grant funds and services to collect recyclable items but paid out only $143,000 to consumers in bottle returns.

The San Francisco BottleBank uses trucks rotating to different supermarket parking lots to collect returnables.

Local TV station KGO-TV reports that though the program has successfully expanded access to recycling, the nonprofit group Consumer Watchdog maintains the expense far outweighs the value and called to scrap the program.

"A project that costs 79 cents to return a nickel deposit after 15 months of operation is a failed project that does not deserve more funding," Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, said in a news release.