Kickstart: Quieter pickleball play

Shopping for the pickleball enthusiast on your holiday list? Perhaps you want to pick something that offers a benefit to nonplayers as well: quieter equipment.

USA Pickleball recently launched certification of a "quiet category" for pickleball products to help it combat complaints of noisy play affecting neighborhoods. The noise concern involves the echoing "pop, pop, pop" sound of the balls — made using rotomolding or injection molding — rather than curses from sore losers, although I'm sure those don't help.

"With the sport's growth, addressing noise concerns is essential to maintain a positive relationship between residential communities and facility operators," USA Pickleball CEO Mike Nealy said in a news release.

Earlier this month, the group noted its first official "quiet" item, a paddle designed by Owl Sport Inc., a Vancouver company that promises to be 50 percent quieter than traditional paddles.

Owl's $169 paddles have a polypropylene core and a proprietary composite it calls "acoustene" on the surface to absorb sound without affecting performance. Tennis legend John McEnroe and Drew Brees, the former MVP quarterback for the New Orleans Saints, joined the company and USA Pickleball at a special launch event in New York Nov. 21.

Paddles and balls are made at a variety of sites, both in the U.S. and Asia.

USA Pickleball notes that its quiet category will cover paddles, balls and site design improvements that will help court owners reduce noise level during play.

Empathy is good for business.

Or, rather, empathy and other tools of emotional intelligence are good for employees, which is then good for business. At least that's the take of Hillary Thomas, vice president of Connecticut mold maker Westminster Tool. Westminster was one of the Plastics News 2023 Best Places to Work, and Thomas traces that status to a focused effort on improving its emotional quality, or EQ.

At the Women Breaking the Mold Networking Forum in Arizona earlier this month, Thomas said when Westminster began its transition to using EQ, it had 20 employees with an average age of 52 and little repeat business. It saw a workforce turnover of about 60 percent, as PN's Jordan Vitick writes.

While it took a few years to turn things around, the company now has 30 employees with an average age of 33 and 60 percent of its work is repeat business.

Can caps help reduce food waste?

The Bump Cap, developed by United Caps of Luxembourg and United Kingdom-based Mimica, embeds a food-safe, plant-based gel technology that is first activated when a container is opened, then it can use time and temperature to accurately measure when the contents spoil. Once that happens, small tactile bumps appear on the top of the cap, making spoilage easier to spot. (The bumps also are of value to people with vision issues who have problems reading a small "best by" date, the companies noted.)

Sounds easier to use than the "sniff and guess" method to determine when milk goes bad.