Kickstart: Sustainability promises, version 2.0

Promises are easy. Following through is almost always harder than it appears. That's true for sustainability as well as most of life.

In the past few days, both the U.S. Plastics Pact and As You Sow, an environmental investors' group, have noted that companies are behind their targets when it comes to adding recycled content, making more packaging recyclable and reducing the use of virgin plastics.

The Plastics Pact, an offshoot of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, had originally set 2025 as a pivotal year for initial sustainability goals. Its "Roadmap 2.0" now mostly sets the time frame back five years to 2030.

"We knew [the goals were] incredibly ambitious to begin with," Executive Director Emily Tipaldo said, adding 2025 was selected to provide a marker for that initial push. "Were they all attainable on a 2025 timeline? Probably not."

As You Sow, meanwhile, examined promised improvements from global companies and compared them with the actual progress. Only 22 of 147 businesses were on pace to meet goals to use only recyclable packaging and just nine out of 225 earned a "B" grade. None received an "A."

Tupperware Brands Corp. has been struggling for years and Plastics News has been following it. It's a big story involving a storied brand that had been a household mainstay since the 1950s but has struggled in the past few decades.

The story behind reporter Jim Johnson's latest update on the company for PN — that Tupperware is ending production at its only U.S. plant — also shows the value of data. Or, more specifically, a data specialist who really wants to nail down the right numbers.

As part of PN's annual ranking of North American injection molders, Hollee Keller, our editorial research coordinator, does her best to get full numbers on every company in the region. For those that don't respond, she calls, emails, reads financial statements and takes several other steps to get the right information.

She's had her eye on Tupperware and activity at its plant in Hemingway, S.C., and contacted company officials, community leaders, local media and other sources to see if it was still operating. The rest of the editorial team was following along, and when we confirmed the closure, Jim was ready with the background and context needed to explain the story.

The list of the top 100 North American injection molders, which will not include Tupperware, will appear in the June 17 issue of Plastics News. Watch for Hollee's blog with more data from her rankings research next week.

When is plastic furniture art rather than mass-market commercialism? When it's made by a designer using a heat gun to shape glycol-modified PET sheets by hand for an exhibition called Crafting Plastic.

Denmark-based Kasper Kyster has used a variety of other materials in the past, including wood and metal, but the new showcase represents "a transformation from the industrial to the organic" that he told the design website DeZeen is intended to "show how plastic can be used in a more craftsmanlike way."

Crafting Plastic will be featured at Copenhagen's Danske Kunsthåndværkere & Designere through June 27.