Kickstart: The need for speed

It's easy to talk about "speed to market," but how does a company make that happen?

Toolmaker Cavalier Tool & Manufacturing Ltd. is tackling that work by embracing automation and tooling components.

"We're going to be making our own mold components, bringing in-house what we used to farm out," President Brian Bendig told Plastics News' Catherine Kavanaugh.

An extensive, $8 million investment in automation will see the company convert a new building — its third in the Windsor, Ontario, region — with an array of equipment improvements. Using them, workers will be able to schedule production to optimize machine time, getting finished molds out faster.

"A lot of our purchasing decisions are based on automation solutions as well as speed," Bendig said. "I'm buying speed."

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Medical products giant Baxter International is becoming part of a post-pandemic trend: It is selling its massive headquarters facility north of Chicago to reflect a corporate workforce that prefers to work at home or only go into the office a few days a week.

"To best meet the evolving needs of our employees, Baxter is reviewing options related to our current headquarters — which was designed and built in the 1970s — and will pursue options for a new modern and more sustainable headquarters," the company told our sister paper Crain's Chicago Business.

Baxter owns its current headquarters, a 10-acre, 10-building, 646,000-square-foot complex in Deerfield, Ill. The office downsizing comes just months after it purchased fellow medical supply business Hill-Rom, a maker of hospital beds and other equipment, to create a $15 billion corporation.

Baxter isn't alone in adjusting to smaller office size. Crain's Chicago Business notes that 27 percent of suburban offices are vacant.

The changes are also forcing office furniture suppliers to adapt. Steelcase Inc. is emphasizing products and architecture for hybrid offices on its website and will emphasize its new Flex collection (including a stool made from BASF's Ccycled chemically recycled nylon) during June's NeoCon trade show in Chicago.

The water bottles used by some professional cyclists this year will be a little different.

The EF Education-EasyPost and EF Education-TIBCO-SVB teams announced May 5 that they will use bottles made with an unspecified bio-based material that bottle supplier Cannondale says is fully compostable in an industrial composting system.

Because of sanitation issues, bicycle water bottles are typically discarded after every use, and the traditional rigid low density polyethylene isn't normally recycled. Professional cyclists go through an estimated 630,000 bottles every year. EF uses 34,000 annually, so compostable bottles could help to reduce the amount of plastic going into landfills.