Kickstart: Sustainability finds a way

There's at least one dinosaur that's ready with some warm clothes for the next ice age — with help from recycled PET bottles.

London's Natural History Museum has unveiled its 2023 Christmas sweater (or jumper, if you're in the U.K.) for its animatronic Tyrannosaurus rex. Made with 60 percent cotton and 40 percent recycled PET, the sweater is 10 feet wide to fit around the model, weighs nearly 5 pounds and is 12.5 times larger than a typical sweater.

The museum has outfitted the T. rex with a Christmas sweater since 2021, but this year's version is the first with a sustainability angle, the museum told the BBC.

The museum shop sells human-sized versions with the same pattern featuring dinosaur skeletons. The design probably isn't bad enough to be considered worthy of an office "ugly Christmas sweater" award, but I certainly wouldn't volunteer to tell a T. rex that he lost a contest.

The last few weeks have brought us a lot of statistics about the U.S. economy.

In his newest Numbers Matter Shorts video, PN Economics Editor Bill Wood does his best to put that data into perspective. (The short-form videos are free to everyone and are less than 10 minutes in length.)

In general, he said, GDP growth and employment numbers look better than economists expected a year ago, but one set of numbers in particular drew his interest: worker productivity. The latest report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows a 4.7 percent increase for the third quarter.

"[Productivity is] the magic elixir for the U.S. economy going forward," Bill said. "How do we take care of inflation, how do we expand our economy, how do we raise living standards, how do we do all the things we want to do? That's with productivity."

For plastics processors, that means investments in automation, robots and artificial intelligence.

"Productivity is how you outcompete low-cost countries," he said. "It's how you raise your standard of living."

Want to catch someone's eye at the next high-fashion event? How about wearing a dress featuring 3D printing to embed LED lights that are then motion activated to flash as you walk through the room.

Dutch materials and technology company Chromatic 3D Materials worked with designer Anouk Wipprecht on the dress featuring 75 LEDs encased in 3D printed urethane bubbles. The bubbles provide watertight packaging for the lights, meaning that the dress can be washed and worn again. The company is showing it at Formnext 2023 in Frankfurt, Germany, Nov. 7-10.

Chromatic says it is one of the first garments in the world to directly embed electronics within 3D printed elastomers.

Don't expect to find it on Shein.com just yet. In a video, Wipprecht says there are only two of the dresses currently, one in light blue and the other in dark blue.