Kickstart: What happens when a health care equipment giant stumbles?

Invacare Corp. was a giant in home health care equipment. It still is, with some $900 million in annual revenue. But that's down from $1.7 billion at its peak, with a stock price valued at more than $50 per share. In 2004, Spartech Corp. built an injection molding plant in Mexico in part to keep up with demands for wheelchair parts from the Elyria, Ohio-based company.

But as of Sept. 19, each share was selling for about $1. For the first half of 2022, Invacare reported $390 million in sales, a 7.5 percent drop vs. the same period in 2021, and a net loss of $46 million, a whopping 86 percent increase from a year ago.

Jeremy Nobile from our sister paper Crain's Cleveland Business takes a deep dive into what happened to the company and the work to try and restore it.

"No matter how much they restructure or consolidate or how much they drop off products that are not profitable, they just can't seem to make any money," Matt Mishan, an equity research analyst with KeyBanc Capital Markets who has covered Invacare for many years, told Nobile. "It is a story where you have a unique company that is balance sheet insufficient that continues to run into various macro headwinds."

When political and business leaders meet for the Clinton Global Initiative in New York later this month, they may be sipping from seaweed-based straws intended to replace traditional plastic straws.

Loliware Inc.'s straws are biodegradable and the company is one of 31 "greenhouse entrepreneurs" featured at the event.

Loliware announced earlier this year that Missouri-based extruder Sinclair & Rush Inc. was picked for the first mass production of the Blue Carbon-brand seaweed-based straw.

"[Loliware's] straws will break down completely, just like a food product," CEO Chelsea Fawn Briganti told Plastics News in 2020.

Plastics News is trying to catch up with companies impacted by Hurricane Fiona in Puerto Rico.

We already know that the island is home to several plastics processors, lured by past tax breaks. In 2017, Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico as a Category 4 storm and wiped out much of its infrastructure.

Hurricane Fiona was weaker — a Category 1—but still carried 85 mph winds and dumped more than 20 inches of rain, leading to "catastrophic flooding," according to the National Hurricane Center.

Reports from Puerto Rico noted that investments in backup generators have aided communities, but bridges and roads were damaged.

Catherine Kavanaugh has a brief report out now for PN, although most companies we've reached with offices on the mainland U.S. still didn't know what damage might have occurred in Puerto Rico.

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