Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1302781
November 2020 / 9 PBE UPFRONT INDUSTRY NEWS General Mills investing in upgrades, line addition at US plants General Mills, Minneapolis, MN, announced that it will upgrade its plant in Cedar Rapids, IA. The plant is primarily for producing cereal, fruit snacks, and frosting. As part of the updates, the company will modernize an existing production line, acquire new machinery, and upgrade the line's current produc- tion equipment to boost capacity. The Iowa Economic Develop- ment Authority (IEDA) made the announcement in August and notes that the facility is expected to add about 50 new jobs. The company is also planning to add another line to produce Cin- namon Toast Crunch cereal at its Covington, GA, plant. The cereal is the second most popular break- fast cereal in the US and, according to the company, the line's addition will add 40 jobs in Georgia for a total of 440 jobs at the plant. General Mills is a US food pro- ducer with many branded products. Plastics consortium makes pact to reach 50 percent recycling rate in US A consortium of more than 60 companies, plastics trade groups, and governments in the US have launched a target to achieve a 50 percent rate for packaging recycling and composting. The pact would also increase recycled content. The pact joins seven other agreements made globally to express the grow- ing desire to improve recycling rates, though many see the pacts as lacking actionable steps and as more of a symbolic step toward reducing waste. Pact organizers will spend a few months creating a roadmap that will reduce virgin plastics use in packaging by 2025. The list of signa- tories includes Coca Cola, Walmart, plastics producer Amcor Ltd., and industry groups such as the Asso- ciation of Plastic Recyclers. Some environmental groups have also joined the agreement. The pact will include the following targets: • Fifty percent of plastic pack- aging either effectively recycled or composted • Thirty percent recycled con- tent or responsibly sourced biobased content in plastic packaging • All plastic packaging is reusable, recyclable, or com- postable • Development of a list of prob- lematic plastic packaging to be eliminated by 2025 The agreement includes The Recycling Partnership, which is a national organization dedicated to improving recycling. According to the group, the participants in the pact believe that incremental change isn't really enough. In a press release from the organization, it says, "The U.S. Plastics Pact is an ambitious initiative to unify diverse public-private stakeholders across the plastics value chain to rethink the way we design, use, and reuse plastics, to create a path toward a circular economy for plastic in the United States." The pact is being administered by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF), which is also administering the other global plastics pacts else- where in the world. The foundation was created in 2010 to accelerate the transition to a circular economy by bringing together decision-makers in business, government, and aca- demia. The World Wildlife Fund will be reporting the pact's progress through a website. EMF worked with many large global companies to secure commitments to sustain- ability through EMF's New Plastics Economy project and the pact is an extension of those commitments into a larger collaborative effort. The U.S. Plastics Pact aims to take the recycling rate in the US from less than 15 percent to nearly 50 percent, which would be a rather large jump considering the pact is strictly voluntary with no account- ability measure built in. While the pact takes shape in the US, the UK's pact to increase recycling to 70 per- cent is being looked to for guidance as that pact had many of the same goals as the US pact. For more infor- mation on the pact and its progress, visit www.newplasticseconomy.org. www.monitortech.com monitor@monitortech.com Tel.: 1-800-601-5949 or1-630-365-9403 Hazardous Location Versions Available DustAlarm ® ES Broken Bag Detector lTheeasyautoset-upfunctionto automaticallyconfigureparameters&alarms. lExcellentrepeatabilitynotaffectedby variationsinrelativehumidity, processtemperatureorpressure. lUsesprovenACTriboelectrictechnology withadvancedalgorithmstoprovide themostaccuratedustmonitoring. lConnectwithfree DustConfig TM software tosetcustomalarmpointsandview liveactivityinduct. DustTrend TM ES Dust Emission Trend Monitor l Addstheabilitytoprovidecontinuous trendmeasurementsvia4-20mAoutput. O O p p t t i i m m i i z z e e D D u u s s t t M M o o n n i i t t o o r r i i n n g g