Kickstart: Storing 75 years of success

If you took up some new craft during the pandemic — then had to buy something to organize all the bits and pieces of stuff from that craft — you may be a Flambeau Inc. customer. Or if you ever tried to master "walk-the-dog" or "around-the-world" tricks with a yo-yo, you've probably gotten your hands on a Flambeau product.

The Baraboo, Wis., injection molder owns the ArtBin and Duncan Yo-Yo brands and this year marks its 75th anniversary. President and CEO Jason Sauey told PN's Bridget Janis that the celebration will be focused on the workers who keep the company going.

"It's not just about celebrating a 75th anniversary. It's one thing to exist for that amount of time, which is significant, and it's very rare that business lasts that long," he said. "But what's more important is what are we doing to create greater duration going forward."

Right now seems like a good time to start planning summer road trips. How about one themed around visits to Mold-A-Rama or Mold-A-Matic machines?

Roadtrippers magazine has a story featuring 10 U.S. museums with the souvenir-making injection blow molding machines, with sites ranging from Milwaukee to San Antonio, Texas.

If you don't want to wait until summer, how about spring break? There are five Mold-A-Matic machines in Central Florida. (Mold-A-Matic is a brand of Mold-A-Rama operated by Unique Souvenirs Inc.)

Writer Alexandra Charitan says she started her collection of plastic items in 2017 at a museum in Orlando.

"The Manatee Viewing Center has two machines — as does Gatorland — and within a few hours, I had the beginnings of a collection and a new lifelong mission: to find them all," she wrote.

Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry has a special exhibit on Mold-A-Rama running through most of 2023.

Cross-linked polyethylene pipes — PEX — have become a standard in heating, cooling and plumbing applications. But while the pipe offers a lot of flexibility in construction, it's nearly impossible to recycle through standard practices.

A team made up of representatives from Neste, Uponor, Borealis and Wastewise say they have successfully used chemical recycling to convert PEX scrap back into feedstock for new plastics.

"Our new long-term goal is to use 100 percent of our PEX waste as raw material through closed-loop recycling," Thomas Fuhr, chief technology officer at Uponor, said in a news release.

You can find more on the project from our sister publication Sustainable Plastics.