Kickstart: A playlist for treatyheads | Reusable in-flight drinkware | Plastic-eating bacteria

Plastics treatyheads, big news!

The official playlist for the fifth round of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, or INC5, is now out.

OK, to stick with the facts, there is no "official" playlist for the plastics treaty talks.

But Andres Del Castillo, an attorney and treaty delegate with the Center for International Environmental Law, is back again with another treaty-related Spotify playlist, this time for the upcoming final round in Busan, South Korea, from Nov. 25 to Dec. 1.

Del Castillo's six-hour-long #INC5 PlasticsTreaty playlist, which he put out Oct. 24 on LinkedIn with a few collaborators, begins appropriately with "Under Pressure" from Queen and David Bowie.

And since this INC will be in South Korea, you know the list includes rapper Psy, famous for his 2012 viral video "Gangnam Style" satirizing life in Seoul's upscale Gangnam district.

Real treatyheads will appreciate that the list is put together by the "Musically Minded Coalition," which describes itself thusly: "We work to ensure that the Plastics Treaty negotiations are properly soundtracked for the utmost entertainment and motivation for endless nights."

Del Castillo also put together a playlist for the fourth round of talks, in Canada, back in April.

At Kickstart, we missed National Reuse Day this year, on Oct. 20.

Fortunately for this newsletter, Alaska Airlines didn't. The company said it used a Seattle-to-Minneapolis roundtrip flight to test out reusable drink service for passengers, using cups from the company r.World.

Alaska Airlines says it hopes that the reusable cups, which news reports say are made from polypropylene, become accepted by travelers. The airline says it's hoping to cut single-use waste on its flights.

Kudos for promoting reuse, which can often have a better environmental footprint than single-use anything.

I think pictures from the airline's news release get at some of the complexities, however, of figuring out environmental impacts of different single-use packaging.

Alaska Air flight attendants are shown pouring the water from paper-based containers from the company Boxed Water, rather than plastic bottles, although the Boxed Water containers still are made from 25 percent plastic, from liners to keep them waterproof.

This article attempted to compare the environmental impact of different water packaging, including Boxed Water, coming to the conclusion that reuse is probably best.

Researchers at Northwestern University have found a bacterium that can break down plastic for food, opening up possibilities for environmental cleanup.

Professor Ludmilla Aristilde and doctorate students in her lab at the university outside Chicago have analyzed how cells of a Comamonas bacterium devour plastic and say it has implications for bacteria-based technology for handling difficult-to-remove plastic waste.

They published their research in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

"We have systematically shown, for the first time, that a wastewater bacterium can take a starting plastic material, deteriorate it, fragment it, break it down and use it as a source of carbon," Aristilde said. "It is amazing that this bacterium can perform that entire process, and we identified a key enzyme responsible for breaking down the plastic materials."