Kickstart: Of circles and blow molded ladies

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Still feeling a bit jet lagged from Germany? Got a post-K hangover? Or are you just dizzy from all the talk about circular economies?

Hopefully, you'll start feeling like you're back to normal soon, but don't expect the circles to stop turning very quickly. Even after machinery makers and material suppliers started packing up their booths, talk about the role plastics can play in a circular economy has only continued.

Procter & Gamble announced its plan to double the recycled content of its cleaning product packaging in Europe in 2020. BP announced its new $25 million chemical recycling plant in Illinois.

And companies marked an annual report from the Ellen MacArthur Fund by promoting their efforts for a more sustainable future.

Maybe not babies, but their parents.

A new partnership between baby products company Gerber Products Co. and TerraCycle is aimed at difficult-to-recycle baby food packaging.

Parents can now sign up for the new Gerber Recycling Program at https://www.terracycle.com/en-US/brigades/gerber to mail in packaging that can't be otherwise recycled in local municipal programs. Participants will be able to use prepaid shipping labels to send in their packaging for reprocessing.

And yes, that includes all those squeeze pouches, though the company requests that parents (or hungry toddlers) empty out all food first.

Not in the philosophical sense, but in a dollars and cents measurement, the Manufacturers Association for Plastics Processors is out with its annual survey of wages and salaries in the plastics industry.

Bill Bregar has more on it here or you can go to MAPPinc.com, but in a nutshell, wages overall are up, but are increasing at a slower rate than in 2018. But obviously there are some jobs, like design engineer, which saw double-digit increases, while others, such as marketing managers, saw a double-digit drop.

And finally, a survey. If you went to K, maybe you saw people carrying around those nearly life-sized, blow molded figures of a woman. Or maybe you read about them here. Machinery maker BBM called her Miss K, and her giveaway had people lining up for their own.

But we have questions. And so head over to Plastics News on Twitter and tell us: Outrageously cool? Or outrageously head scratching?

And if you took one home, please drop us a reply and tell us where you plan to place her.

We'll see you tomorrow!