According to this recent story in the San Francisco Chronicle, Wham-O, the toy manufacturer founded in a Pasadena, Calif. garage in 1948, will soon be producing Frisbees, Hula Hoops and other products made from recycled plastics (such as margarine tubs, yogurt containers and milk jugs) and sawdust reclaimed from sawmills.

The company’s new owner, Kyle Aguilar, is bringing new energy to Wham-O and recently acquired Sprig Toys Inc., a Colorado-based company that makes ”eco-friendly” preschool toys out of  what it calls “Sprigwood” — the recycled plastic and sawdust mix. According to the Chronicle article, Sprigwood “feels like a slightly heavier plastic with visible flecks of wood and emits the scent of cedar.”

Prior to the use of this material, Frisbees had been injection molded out of polyethylene since the early 1950s. Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about how they have been manufactured.

Wham-O, based in Emeryville, Calif., began as an independent company. In 1982 it was purchased by Kransco Group Companies. In 1994, Mattel bought Wham-O and in 1997 Wham-O became independent once again.  In 2006, the company was purchased by Cornerstone Overseas Investments of Hong Kong.  New owner Aguilar also owns Manufacturing Marvel Inc., which makes toys  — including some Wham-O items — and promotional products from plastic, glass, tin, porcelain and other materials. His purchase of the company will return some Wham-O manufacturing to the United States.

The Frisbee’s inventor, Walter Fredrick “Fred” Morrison, died last month at the age of 90. According to CNN,  he began designing flying discs in 1937 after tossing around popcorn tin lids and cake pans. Soon enough he was selling “Flyin’ Cake Pans” for 25 cents at California beaches and parks. After returning from World War II, Morrison designed a plastic Flyin-Saucer that didn’t catch on. But his better-designed Pluto Platter sold enough to interest Wham-O. The company and Morrison struck a deal in 1957.  Depending on what source you read, 200-300 million Frisbees have been sold.

As many of you avid soccer (also known as “football” outside of the U.S.) fans know, the 2010 FIFA World Cup kicks off on June 11, 2010 in South Africa and will end on July 11. This event is an international competition that is held every four years by members of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the sport’s global governing body. The current format of the tournament involves 32 teams competing for the title. Overall the World Cup is the most widely-viewed sporting event in the world, with an estimated 715.1 million people watching the 2006 final on television. By way of comparison, “only” an estimated 153.4 million viewers watched all or part of this year’s Super Bowl.

This year many of the world’s top soccer players, including Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal, will be wearing shirts made of old plastic bottles at the World Cup. Nike said shirts for the nine national teams wearing its gear (which includes Portugal, Holland, the U.S. and one of the favorites Brazil) would be made from polyester recycled from used bottles. Each shirt uses up to eight plastic bottles retrieved from Japanese and Taiwanese landfill sites. Nike’s fabric suppliers were able to take the plastic bottles and melt them down to produce new yarn that was ultimately converted to fabric for jerseys. The shirts will keep players drier and cooler than previous kits while reducing energy consumption in manufacture by 30% compared to normal polyester. Manufacture of the shirts, which will also be sold to fans, used 13 million plastic bottles – enough to fill 29 football pitches.

Nike isn’t the only company to manufacture shirts out of plastic bottles. Coca-Cola’s Drink2Wear shirts are also made out of recycled bottles, and Patagonia started manufacturing fleece out of post-consumer bottles in 1993 with little fanfare. (Previously we have blogged about Wyndham Hotels’ initiative to institute polyester employee uniforms derived from post-consumer products.) By featuring this technology at a major sporting event watched by millions, Nike is letting the world know that the technology is worth our attention. I couldn’t agree more

On January 25th, many in our industry noted a celebratory milestone – the 50th anniversary of Bubble Wrap®. While this event was not met with fireworks, marching bands or a tickertape parade, Sealed Air, makers of Bubble Wrap,  did conduct a special limited run of gold Bubble Wrap cushioning on January 25th  (see photo, left). For that one day, the factory lines in the company’s Saddle River, N.J. facility changed from the popular clear to gold to commemorate the historic occasion. A Chicago TV station even did a news story on the anniversary.

Bubble Wrap (basically two sheets of polyethylene film sealed in a secret process that traps air between them) started with an attempt by inventors Marc Chavannes and Al Fielding to develop a plastic textured wallpaper—an idea that, unlike their product, fell flat. While their invention found some success as a greenhouse insulator, its potential wasn’t realized until Chavannes looked out the window of an airplane and noted the almost cushioning effect clouds appeared to have on the plane as it descended. A big-time idea came to fruition: Their product would be ideal as cushioning for fragile items.

Now, having lived a somewhat nomadic life for the last decade or so, I have come to appreciate the cushioning power of Bubble Wrap when packing up to move from here to there. I’m certain that this one product has saved a number of my “irreplaceable” items from ending up broken and in the trash.  Yet beyond salvaging my handcrafted beer steins and my collection of Elvis figurines, I am convinced that Bubble Wrap has also saved my sanity from time to time.   Who hasn’t found stress relief or derived pure entertainment from simply popping the bubbles. Stomping them is fun and twisting is an excellent technique as well.

Whether used for a variety of creative purposes — just check out the annual Bubble Wrap Contest for Young Inventors which we blogged about last year – or for its intended packaging purpose,  Bubble Wrap has found an important  place in American pop (pun intended) culture. So the next time you are moving or enthusiastically puncturing bubble after bubble, please stop for a moment to acknowledge the golden anniversary of Bubble Wrap and tip your hat to Chavannes and Fielding for creating this invaluable product.

Recently I was talking with a contact from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) Marine Debris Program (MDP).  The MDP serves as a centralized marine debris capability within NOAA in order to coordinate, strengthen and increase the visibility of marine debris issues and efforts within the agency, its partners and the public.  This program is undertaking a national and international effort focusing on identifying, reducing and preventing debris in the marine environment. (Of course, SPI’s own marine debris initiative, Operation Clean Sweep, includes approximately 200 companies that have pledged to take necessary management steps to ensure that spilled resin pellets do not make their way to local waterways or the ocean.)  

Through the years, SPI has worked with MDP staff on an educational front including last year’s pre-NPE2009 event entitled “Polymers and the Environment: Emerging Technologies and Science” co-sponsored by SPI and the BioEnvironmental Polymer Society (BEPS).  Dr. Holly Bamford, Marine Debris Program Director and Division Chief, spoke at the conference regarding marine debris issues and the plastics industry.

In talking with my contact, I was interested to hear about a recent program the MDP has undertaken to turn derelict fishing nets (one of the larger contributors to marine debris) into energy.  The Nets-to-Energy Program has taken the fishing net situation and used it as an opportunity to turn the waste into something beneficial: usable electricity.

The whole concept of “waste-to-energy” is not new to the plastics industry.  As SPI President Bill Carteaux has blogged about, plastics are derived from petroleum or natural gas giving them a stored energy value higher than any other material commonly found in the waste stream.  According to one source:

“…plastics have a high calorific value, equivalent to or higher than that of coal, so can provide a very useful source of energy after serving their useful life as a plastics product. Plastics left in municipal waste incinerators (energy-from-waste plants) help generate useful power and heat, while using separated fractions such as paper/plastic mixtures as alternative fuels in power stations offer the prospect of replacing coal and reducing the emission of greenhouse gases.”

In Europe more than 380 waste-to-energy plants exist to deliver energy (heat and electricity) to citizens and industry.  According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), there are only about 90 waste-to-energy plants in the U.S.  However these plants generate enough electricity to supply almost 3 million households.  Imagine what more plants could do.  The idea of recovering energy from plastic is one that should continue to be explored.  As the nation seeks to increase its energy security and looks to sources of new and alternative energy, energy recovery through plastics should be part of the mix.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I am a big fan of the Indianapolis Colts. But it wasn’t the New Orleans Saints victory over my hometown team in the Super Bowl that upset me the most last Sunday evening. No, what got me miffed was that preachy “Green Police” Audi commercial that I saw during the fourth quarter. (See Barry Eisenberg’s blog post for the details on the ad and why our industry was not amused.) 

A splashy ad that paints plastics with a broad “environmentally unfriendly” brush gets me riled up because it places a premium on being funny rather than true. The “Green Police” ad reinforces the same tired and, frankly, ignorant biases against plastics that my SPI team and I have been trying to educate people about since I became president of the association.  In 2008 and 2009 combined I personally gave about 50 presentations seen by approximately 10,000 people that centered on how plastics contribute to a more sustainable world. But in one fell 60-second swoop, more than 100 million people saw an ad that preyed on preconceived notions of plastics. (According to the Nielsen Co., more than 106 million people watched the Super Bowl, making it the most-watched program in U.S. television.)

But unfair bias works both ways and I believe the ad also magnified the negative perceptions people have about environmentalists being crazy extremists. The New York Times called the Audi ad a “misguided spot that put the ‘mental’ in ‘environmental.’”  Scott Cooney, author of Build a Green Small Business:  Profitable Ways to Become an Ecopreneur, writes that the Audi ad:

…quickly turned into yet another perhaps well-intentioned ad that casts environmentalists, frankly, as wack-jobs… Perhaps the most offensive, to those of us in the sustainability movement was where an army of “Green Police,” prowling through people’s trash, finds a battery and storms the house of the offender. While I suppose the ad execs who came up with it thought they were brilliant, I would only imagine most in the sustainability movement, like me, groaned at the implication that people who care about the environment are psychotic enough to prosecute people who choose plastic at the grocery store or don’t compost their scraps.  Ugh, Middle America just took another unneeded step away from feeling that sustainability is cool, easy, and normal.

I’ve worked in the plastics industry for more than 20 years and I am so proud of the innovative contributions our industry has made to the automobile industry. That’s why Audi’s ad leaves many of us industry veterans feeling as if we’ve been slapped in the face by a loved one. ”Truth in Engineering” is the name of the advertising campaign Audi launched in 2007 and it is the tag line at the end of the “Green Police ” ad.  I wish Audi had given “Truth in Advertising” equal billing.