Heavy Metal

This edition of Heavy Metal is about succession planning — both at your company and in your personal life. It's a very important subject.

Give your collaborative robot a gift card. Take your cobot out for lunch. It's OK. Heavy Metal gives you permission, because January is National Cobot Awareness Month.

Going back to Heavy Metal's college days, the idea of unending growth based on ever-faster consumption of finite natural resources — coal, oil, natural gas and things like that — rubbed Metal the wrong way. At some point, it all falls apart.

This column is one half of this week's viewpoint reflecting on 30 years. Visit Audrey LaForest's blog for the other half.

What used to be handled with a fist fight out by the loading dock now too often ends in a mass shooting. An angry worker who was fired. Angry ex-husbands or ex-wives. Scott Lowry's message: Have a plan and coordinate with local emergency responders — in advance.

Private equity shoppers are still active in the plastics machinery world, but the surprise news that Hillenbrand Inc. is buying Milacron Holdings Corp. — both of them industrial companies traded on the New York Stock Exchange — signals the moves by big public companies to build plastics technology groups is far from over

Adams Manufacturing has declared June 21 as National Adirondack Day. Just like National Hangover Day, Cuddle Up Day and Thesaurus Day. (Actually, those last two sound pretty good. … Full confession: Heavy Metal loves to cuddle. And did you really think Metal has a naturally great vocabulary?)

Plastics was still pretty new, but U.S. companies churned out blow molded canteens, windshields on warplanes, vinyl raincoats, helmet liners and more.

Ah, Spring! Flowers in bloom. About time to cut the grass after you watch that final season of "Game of Thrones." But here's the best part: Once again it's time for the Plastics News Processor of the Year Award!