Kickstart: A plastic ballet, a bubble wrap tutu and mottainai

Japanese dance company K Ballet is taking recycling to new heights, using 10,000 discarded PET containers and bubble wrap as costumes in a performance the artists hope brings attention to plastic waste and pollution.

A new ballet created by the company – and called what else, "Plastic" – opened recently in Yokohama. It features dancers navigating a landscape of plastic bottle walls, draped in bubble wrap tutus and plastic packaging that a few weeks earlier would have been discarded by Japanese consumers.

The producer of the show, Taiju Takano, told the English-language Japan Times that the show is designed to evoke the Japanese concept of "mottainai," or regret over waste, and raise awareness of pollution from plastic.

Some of the dancers, however, also said they saw beauty in their use of plastic, in the way light went through the bottles and bubble wrap to create a heavenly visual quality on stage.

This video news report from the AFP press agency offers a glimpse of the performance. Judging by these images, the dancers have a point.

Moving from the world of dance to the coast of France, the beaches of Brittany have become the location of a French polymer mystery.

Plastic pellets have been washing ashore, prompting investigations from governments and a Jan. 25 public statement from France's minister for ecological transition, who called the situation "an environmental nightmare."

There's a big problem as far as accountability, however. No one seems to know the source of the pellets.

The leading theory is they've spilled from shipping containers, similar to a spill of 87 containers of plastic from a cargo freighter off the coast of Sri Lanka in May 2021. But that still leaves unclear which shipping line or company.

French authorities are promising action, although they acknowledge it could be tough to find the culprit. Volunteers have been combing French beaches to try to help in the cleanup, although they told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. it feels like a daunting task.

The French concern comes as two European plastics trade groups on Jan. 23 launched an upgraded certification program for the industry's voluntary Operation Clean Sweep, a best practices program for keeping pellets from spilling from factories.

The topic's getting a lot of attention. A recent report from Norway and other Scandinavian governments suggested the plastics treaty negotiations could take up the issue.

The authors of the report pushed for writing pellet leakage controls into law, rather than making it a voluntary industry program, a point echoed by some environmental groups in Europe.

And finally, uncertainty is a word you hear a lot these days about the economy.

It was part of resin maker Dow Inc.'s Jan. 26 announcement, offered as a reason for cutting 2,000 of its 38,000 jobs in response to challenging 2022 full-year financials.

As my colleague Frank Esposito reported, the Midland, Mich.-based company said sales rose 3.5 percent for the year, to $56.9 billion, while net profits dropped 28 percent to $4.64 billion

Uncertainty also showed up in a big way in a recent economic survey of the U.S. plastics processing industry.

The trade group Manufacturers Association for Plastics Processors came out Jan. 24 with its annual survey of economic conditions among its members and also found a lot that was unclear.

It found record jumps, in the wrong way, for sales and profits among its members from the third to the fourth quarters and compared with a year ago. More than 90 percent of survey respondents were injection molding companies.

It was not all bad news, but the number of companies running unprofitably hit 8 percent last year, which a MAPP leader said "makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up."

PN's own Bill Wood, our economics editor, also pointed out in his most recent column that the residential housing market is already in a recession, and he predicts plastics companies will face strong headwinds this year, particularly as the Fed keeps raising interest rates to try to bring inflation under control.