Kickstart: Bonjour, Paris

Bonjour! Plastics News is going to the plastics treaty talks in Paris next week.

It's the second of five rounds of negotiations, spread over the next two years, and Steve Toloken from our team will be there, amid the throngs of an estimated 2,700 diplomats and observers from industry, civil society and other groups (and oh yeah, journalists).

Much of what any agreement could say is still to be determined, but industry will be there in much larger numbers than at the first round in November in Uruguay.

Some of that may be the lure of Paris, but the talks are moving very quickly by the pace of an international agreement. A third session is planned in Kenya later this year.

At this point, everything's on the table: producer responsibility, production caps, recycled content, health impacts from additives, lists of "problematic" plastics and calls from industry to weigh environmental impacts of other materials.

Look for reports on what different groups are doing and a series of multimedia interviews from the talks in the weeks after. (And thanks to Steve for not only covering the talks but also writing this part of today's Kickstart.)

If negotiations go so well in Paris that you want to celebrate with some sparkling wine, then you may soon be able to pop the cork on a PET bottle.

Materials maker Indorama Ventures and packaging machinery maker Sipa together unveiled what they termed "the world's first sustainable, monolayer PET sparkling wine bottle to market," on May 25, International Wine Day.

The bottle is fully recyclable, fits onto existing glass-filling lines and allows wine makers to use the same cork as a glass bottle.

The bottle is 80 percent lighter than glass, making it possible for trucks to carry more bottles in a "shatterproof" form that improves shipping logistics.

In addition, it comes in at a time when traditional glass bottles have gotten more expensive, with the average price up 23 percent between April 2020 and April 2023 in European markets.

Maybe Paris isn't in your travel plans, but if you go to Washington, D.C., then you can still get a glimpse of the city's architecture — along with London's Buckingham Palace, Rome's Colosseum, the Forbidden City in Beijing, and the Opera House and Harbour Bridge from Sydney — all in Lego.

The National Building Museum in Washington will host the Brick City Exhibition by United Kingdom-based artist Warren Elsmore for the next two years.

Brick City features 37 Lego structures mimicking architecture from around the world. The largest copies London's St. Pancras Station, measures 12 feet long and is built from more than 180,000 Lego bricks.

"The National Building Museum's mission is to inspire curiosity about the world we design and build," Aileen Fuchs, president and executive director for the museum, said in a news release. "Our goal is for visitors to leave this exhibition inspired and with a renewed sense of wonder about the possibilities of what you can create."