Kickstart: This week's lesson on plastics and frigid cold

Winter weather crashed into the bulk of the United States in the past few days, leaving its mark with travel delays, increased demand for energy and a very unexpected example of the effect of cold temperatures on thermoplastics.

The lesson came courtesy of the NFL on Jan. 13 during a playoff game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins when the the outer shell of Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes' helmet shattered during a play when temperatures in Kansas City were 4° below zero F.

"It was a first for me," he said in a post-game press conference.

Mahomes' preferred helmet is the Vicis 02, which has an outer layer designed to flex during impact and an inner foam layer providing further protection, according to the social media account of footballrs.network, a group following football equipment news in addition to teams and players.

The Vicis and two other popular helmet brands in the NFL — the Schutt F7 and the Riddell Speedflex — are designed to flex during impact but each helmet works in a slightly different way, footballrs.network noted. The Vicis has a larger impact area able to withstand tackles from multiple angles, but the extreme cold reached a critical point for the material.

To add to the situation, Mahomes added later, his backup helmet waiting on the sidelines was "completely frozen," so he had problems getting it on quickly, prompting him to briefly continue play with the broken helmet.

For the plastics industry, the extreme cold that dipped south into Texas prompted concerns that the state's energy grid could once again fail as it did in 2021.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) had called on users to conserve energy usage to avoid overwhelming the power grid, and as of midday on Jan. 16, it seemed to have avoided the worst possible scenario.

However, Plastics News' Frank Esposito noted in the January Polymer Points Live webinar, there have been limited reports that some ethylene production shut down as a precaution in Texas. While those limited outages likely won't have the ripple effect of 2021's shutdown, they may be enough to push through a price hike materials makers have been seeking.

He estimated a "more than 50 percent chance of that [increase] sticking this month."

You can get Frank's full take on resin prices and materials trends by watching the recorded webinar, available to subscribers here.

Consumer electronics company Samsung is marking its use of more sustainable materials, saying at the CES trade show in Las Vegas that recycled plastics made up 14 percent of the total plastics used by the company in 2022.

"We start by incorporating recycled materials into some of our most loved products, such as recycled fishing nets in our Galaxy," Inhee Chung, vice president of corporate sustainability at Samsung, said at the show, where its booth used recycled ABS and recycled polypropylene for its walls.

It has set a target to have half of its plastics come from recycled content by 2030, our sister paper Sustainable Plastics writes.