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Talent Talk: Salary Increase Expectations for 2025
As most are aware, the red-hot labor markets of 2022 and 2023, arguably the tightest the US economy had seen since World War II, have eased in recent months. For manufacturing in general, and the plastics industry in particular, that will provide a window where finding and attracting talent will be somewhat easier than in the past couple of years.
As with all things cyclical, that window will not stay open forever, but that is another topic for another day. Today I want to focus on what this will mean for salary budgets, as HR and hiring managers soon will be preparing those for 2025.
Salary predictions from the Conference Board
Those who lived through those hiring difficulties will also remember how expensive it became to land someone from the industry. Top performers were asking for —?and receiving —?15 to 20% increases and sometimes even more. Sign-on bonuses became the norm, not just for executives, but all the way down to key individual contributors.
I bet you’re thinking it won’t be so expensive to hire in 2025, right? You might think that, but a recent report indicates that may not be the case. A Sept. 8 report by the Conference Board showed that base salary increases for 2025 are projected to be the same, or slightly higher —?3.9% vs 3.8% —?than in 2024.
Whither bonuses?
The Conference Board surveyed 300 compensation leaders and found that elevated wages are expected to continue into 2025, even as the pace of hiring slows. This is being driven by a shrinking skilled labor supply where businesses will focus on retaining their current workforce. While most companies said they’ll continue one-time bonuses, like sign-on and retention incentives, the trend is toward reducing as opposed to increasing them.
Workers expect competitive salaries
A separate report by software company Payscale concluded that even though the economic conditions may be changing, workers still expect competitive pay. As I’m writing this, Boeing workers have rejected an offer that reportedly would have increased their wages by 25% over four years. Anecdotal stories like this would not indicate that there are going to be discounts in the labor market any time soon.
New Leadership at Husky Technologies
By PlasticsToday Staff
Husky Technologies announced today that longtime CEO John Galt will transition to the role of chairman and Husky COO Bradley Selleck will become CEO, effective Oct. 1.
Husky said the transition is the culmination of a carefully orchestrated plan focused on building a world-class management team, fostering and embracing their capabilities, and optimizing the company’s human capital as it enters the next chapter. It is a calculated step that not only positions Husky for future growth, but also ensures continuity and stability through the transition.
Transition years in the making
“John has been preparing the company for this for several years and I commend him and the team for taking such a thoughtful and deliberate approach,” said Louis Samson, co-president of Platinum Equity, the Beverly Hills–based private equity firm that owns Husky Technologies. “Brad is a uniquely talented executive and key architect of the company’s current operating model. He has made a material and multi-faceted contribution to Husky since joining approximately three years ago and has proven beyond any doubt that he’s up to the task and ready to take the reins.”
Galt joined Husky in 1985 and was appointed CEO in 2005. For nearly four decades he has played a pivotal role growing the business from its early days as a founder-led creative enterprise into a global industrial leader, said Husky in the announcement.
“Leading Husky has been one of the greatest honors of my career,” said Galt. “Over the last 19 years as CEO, I have seen this company evolve into a global leader, driven by our relentless pursuit of innovation and our commitment to making a positive impact on the world.”
Growth built on continuity
Galt said Selleck’s appointment reflects Husky’s continued commitment to its strategic priorities, ensuring continuity while positioning the company for future growth.
Selleck joined Husky in 2022 with more than 25 years of leadership experience in operations, supply chain, and quality as an executive for large-scale global industrial organizations. As CEO, he will continue to focus on executing strategic priorities, emphasizing profitable growth, sustainability, innovation, and customer success, said Husky.
In his role as chairman, Galt will continue to serve as an advocate for advancing sustainability practices across the industry and be available to the leadership team to assist with customer and investor relations, as well as advanced product development, according to Husky.
Ocean Cleanup Needs to Clean Up Its Hype
Ocean Cleanup is a non-profit started in 2013 by then 18-year-old Boyan Slat of the Netherlands. He proposed and developed a number of skimmer-type devices to retrieve plastic floating in the ocean gyres and the rivers emptying into them.
One of their plastics-gathering trips returned to San Francisco recently to big fanfare and a shocking declaration from Slat: The “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” could be completely cleaned up in 10 years for the low cost of $7.5 billion.
Hype vs. reality
Wow. $7.5 billion would be an incredible value —?go for it. Yet, as we’ve consistently seen with Ocean Cleanup over the last 11 years, the PR hype vastly exceeds the reality, and this time it’s no different.
(I’m more amazed that Slat, someone who didn’t complete his engineering degree, is able to gather together so many people and corporate sponsors for a large-scale engineering project that was seriously questioned from the get-go. He is unquestionably a terrific salesperson.)
This last trip hauled out 18 tons of plastics, and Slat claims that with 5000 more trips, the Garbage Patch will be gone.
No.
Fishing boats will continue to lose nets and other gear, and rivers will continue to deliver plastic to the seas. The answer is no. Clearly no. Remove plastics today and they will be replaced next week. Ocean Cleanup knows this. Its own research “suggests that ocean plastic pollution . . . is increasing exponentially.” Those are great words to make a problem sound threatening and worthy of immediate attention, but they also make that problem even more challenging to solve.
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A numbers game
Even if new additions to the Garbage Patch are eliminated, Ocean Cleanup plays a numbers game to convince people that the patch will be gone. The plastic being collected is all “macroplastic,” and none of it is microplastic. Since when do microplastics not matter? How can they claim to clean up the Garbage Patch? By focusing on the fact that macroplastics make up 92% of the mass of plastic in the Pacific. (92% is close enough to 100% for engineering dropouts, I guess).
By Ocean Cleanup’s own admission, macroplastic makes up just 6% of the number of plastic pieces in the Pacific. That doesn’t make for a good story, however. I guess we shouldn’t be worried about a micro-problem like microplastics?
Not content with this level of hype, Slat doubles down (literally) by discussing new efforts to get the job done in half the time and half the cost. Ocean Cleanup is developing technology to locate “hotspots” where the plastic concentration is higher and will focus retrieval efforts in those areas.
The dumpling effect
Have you ever tried to get dumplings out of a pot of boiling water with a slotted spoon? It’s easy at first —?you get a full spoon every time. As there are fewer dumplings, however, it takes more effort to fish them out. You need to chase them around, and they don’t always cooperate. Ocean Cleanup will face the exact same problem.
With its new technology, they’ll get great results at first, but then fishing will become scarce. Areas of the ocean already cleaned will need to be cleaned again. Half the time? Half the cost? Not a chance.
To be clear, it’s great that Ocean Cleanup can cheaply remove a sizable mass of plastic from the ocean, but crazily overselling its abilities is hype that I expect from politicians, not engineers. Get all the macroplastics you want, but don’t tell us you’ve cleaned it all up when you aren’t even close.
New (Micro) Wave of PET Recycling Technology Arrives
By Rick Lingle, Senior Technical Editor
The worlds of advanced recycling and automation combine in a partnership between globally recognized Schneider Electric and little-known gr3n, a PET chemical recycler innovator.
The inspired pairing results in the first open automation system for advanced plastic recycling.
Startup gr3n created Microwave Assisted Depolymerization aka MADE. MADE breaks down PET into its chemical building block monomers of terephthalic acid (PTA) and monoethylene glycol (MEG). These monomers can be recombined to create new PET pellets with virgin-like, food-grade quality for packaging and textiles.
Gr3n can potentially achieve bottle-to-textile, textile-to-textile, or even textile-to-bottle recycling, moving from a linear to a circular system.
In March 2024, gr3n successfully demonstrated MADE and the power of Schneider Electric’s open automation technology, EcoStruxure Automation Expert, at its site in Italy. The MADE plant is the research-and-development precursor to the first industrial-scale facility. Plans are to build a production plant in Spain with a capacity to treat more than 40,000 ton/year of polyester waste.
That facility is a joint venture with gr3n shareholder Intecsa Industrial, whose commercial and new business units director Ramiro Prieto said in July, “gr3n has the potential to change the recycling industry, as their technology allows us to tackle things other technologies cannot.”
That same July release noted that post-consumer and/or post-industrial polyesters can be sourced from bottles that are “colored, colorless, transparent, or opaque”; textiles can be 100% polyester or blends of other materials of up to 30% cotton, polyether, or others.
Advantages of an open system.
The modularity of gr3n’s proprietary recycling process permits MADE to be the first plastic recycling plant to use shared automation runtime managed by Universal Automation, based on the IEC 61499 standard.
In simplest terms, the software-defined automation system decouples hardware from software, allowing devices and equipment to be freely connected across architecture layers, regardless of manufacturer. It acts as the digital backbone of industrial operations at the plant, providing the foundation to make more informed decisions.
This establishes a two-fold purpose: a technological demonstration of a new generation of automation systems, where the “intertwining between OT and IT enables the exploitation of advanced functionalities for operations management and data analytics,” according to the release.
“Through software-defined automation and hardware independence, we have been able to effectively de-risk our operations and push the boundaries of our technology,” says Fabio Silvestri, head of marketing and business development at gr3n. “We’ve been able to reconfigure our systems quickly when we see opportunities to improve efficiency, while avoiding supply chain issues due the hardware agnostic nature of the system. This is what is needed to make advanced plastic recycling at reality at scale.”
In short, benefits from this arrangement are:
What this means for real-world recycling growth.
The partnership between gr3n and Schneider Electric started with the signature of a Memorandum of Understanding that enables the chemical recycler to scale operations to new sites quickly and cost-effectively. The solution is expected to reach industrial scale by 2027 with the construction of an annual 35-40 kiloton plant that will include pre-treatment, depolymerization, and repolymerization.?
“People produce around 460 million tons of plastic [yearly], approximately 70% of which are sent to landfills or mismanaged,” says Christophe de Maistre, president energy & chemicals, industrial automation, Schneider Electric. “If we want to overcome the scale of plastic waste, there are certain non-negotiables. We must see integration across the whole product cycle, modularization to optimize and standardize engineering processes, as well as software defined automation solutions that deliver scalability, break silos and act as a gateway to advanced analytics. The project with gr3n demonstrates all these principles, improving flexibility, scalability and the efficiency of their solution and enabling them to grow to an industrial scale.”
Recommended Reads ??
?? Covestro, Li Auto Collaborate to Develop Sustainable Materials for Next-Gen Vehicles: A joint innovation platform with the Chinese EV maker focuses on circularity and future-oriented applications using engineering plastics.
??? Don’t Take This Plastic Pollution Poll of Likely US Voters at Face Value: The survey would have you believe that a majority of participants, including Republicans, agree that the plastics industry should be held responsible for recycling claims.
?? FDA Issues Warning Letters to Chinese Testing Labs: The firms, which provide third-party testing and validation data services to medical device manufacturers, were found to have “pervasive failures” that could result in faulty data.
?? Mold Texturing Pitfalls and Solutions: How to avoid last-minute delays caused by tool cavity segregation, inaccurate scribes, post-grain scuff, and other engraving challenges.
?? Home Depot Sustainability Plan Targets Plastic Elimination: The building products retailer is eliminating “certain harmful materials” aka plastics in favor of fiber alternatives while reducing the overall amount of packaging it uses.
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