C2 THE BULLETIN • SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2022
TODAY
IN HISTORY
By The Associated Press
It’s Aug. 21, the 233rd day of 2022.
There are 132 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
In 1831, Nat Turner launched a
violent slave rebellion in Virginia,
resulting in the deaths of at least
55 whites; scores of Blacks were
killed in retribution in the after-
math of the rebellion. (Turner was
later captured and executed.)
In 1858, the first of seven debates
between Illinois senatorial con-
tenders Abraham Lincoln and
Stephen Douglas took place.
In 1911, Leonardo da Vinci’s
“Mona Lisa” was stolen from the
Louvre Museum in Paris. The
painting was recovered two years
later in Italy.
In 1944, the United States, Brit-
ain, the Soviet Union and China
opened talks at Dumbarton Oaks
in Washington that helped pave
the way for establishment of the
United Nations. The talks con-
cluded on Oct. 7.
In 1959, President Dwight D. Ei-
senhower signed an executive or-
der making Hawaii the 50th state.
In 1991, the hard-line coup
against Soviet President Mikhail
S. Gorbachev collapsed in the
face of a popular uprising led by
Russian Federation President Bo-
ris N. Yeltsin.
In 1992, an 11-day siege began
at the cabin of white separatist
Randy Weaver in Ruby Ridge,
Idaho, as government agents
tried to arrest Weaver for failing
to appear in court on charges of
selling two illegal sawed-off shot-
guns; on the first day of the siege,
Weaver’s teenage son, Samuel,
and Deputy U.S. Marshal William
Degan were killed.
In 1993, in a serious setback for
NASA, engineers lost contact
with the Mars Observer space-
craft as it was about to reach
the red planet on a $980 million
mission.
In 2000, rescue efforts to reach
the sunken Russian nuclear sub-
marine Kursk ended with divers
announcing none of the 118 sail-
ors had survived.
In 2010, Iranian and Russian en-
gineers began loading fuel into
Iran’s first nuclear power plant,
which Moscow promised to safe-
guard to prevent material at the
site from being used in any po-
tential weapons production.
Ten years ago: An insurgent
rocket attack damaged the plane
of the top U.S. general as it sat
parked at a coalition base in Af-
ghanistan; U.S. Army Gen. Martin
Dempsey, the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, was unhurt.
Five years ago: Americans wit-
nessed their first full-blown coast-
to-coast solar eclipse since World
War I, with eclipse-watchers
gathering along a path of totality
extending 2,600 miles across the
continent from Oregon to South
Carolina. In a national address,
President Donald Trump reversed
his past calls for a speedy exit
from Afghanistan and recom-
mitted the United States to the
16-year-old conflict, saying U.S.
troops must “fight to win.”
One year ago: Don Everly, one-
half of the pioneering rock ‘n’ roll
Everly Brothers, died at his home
in Nashville at 84.
Today’s Birthdays: Rock-and-
roll musician James Burton is 83.
Singer Jackie DeShannon is 81.
College and Pro Football Hall of
Famer Willie Lanier is 77. Actor
Patty McCormack is 77. Pop sing-
er-musician Carl Giammarese is
75. Actor Loretta Devine is 73.
NBC newsman Harry Smith is 71.
Singer Glenn Hughes is 70. Actor
Kim Cattrall is 66. College Foot-
ball Hall of Famer and former NFL
quarterback Jim McMahon is 63.
Actor Cleo King is 60. Rock singer
Serj Tankian (System of a Down)
is 55. Actor Carrie-Anne Moss is
52. Milwaukee Brewers manager
Craig Counsell is 52. Rock musi-
cian Liam Howlett (Prodigy) is 51.
Actor Alicia Witt is 47. Singer Kelis
is 43. TV personality Brody Jenner
is 39. Singer Melissa Schuman is
38. Retired Olympic gold medal
sprinter Usain Bolt is 36. Actor
Carlos Pratts is 36. Actor-come-
dian Brooks Wheelan is 36. Actor
Cody Kasch is 35. Country singer
Kacey Musgraves is 34. Actor
Hayden Panettiere is 33. Actor RJ
Mitte is 30. Actor Maxim Knight
is 23.
Breweries get creative with plastic
BY JOSH NOEL
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — You know those hard
plastic beer can holders?
I have 147 of them. I counted.
They’re an array of colors — black,
brown, silver, red, purple, yellow, pink,
blue, three shades of green — and in
mostly four-pack sizes, but also as six-
packs.
Why do I have a rainbow collection
of 147 plastic beer top holders? Churn-
ing through a fair amount of beer is
one reason, but another is that I haven’t
wanted to toss them in the garbage, for
obvious reasons, or in recycling bins
for less obvious reasons: Even when
tossed in with milk jugs, newspapers
and aluminum cans, they rarely wind
up recycled.
So they’ve stacked up for years on
the back porch, no actual plan in place.
I’ve just been waiting for a solution.
The solution has arrived. And I even
got a free beer for my troubles.
Alex Parker gets most of the credit.
Parker, a former Chicago Tribune edi-
tor who works in communications for
Molson Coors, helped launch Craft
Yozamp
Continued from C1
Yozamp saw an opportunity
to beat the competition with a
better product at lower prices.
“I took a hard look at the
industry and I thought I could
do this better by offering more
selection, better pricing and
better service. And that is
what I did,” said Yozamp, a na-
tive of St. Cloud, Minnesota.
Portable solar panels
Solar panels were relatively
new for Yozamp, but he was
no stranger to technology,
having studied engineering
briefly at Portland State Uni-
versity.
Yozamp had also served in
the U.S. Air Force, where he
was responsible for the upkeep
of F-16 fighter jets. He worked
on radar, weapons delivery
technology, and pre-GPS nav-
igation systems for the jets
Work-ready
Continued from C1
1. Attendance
Someone who can show up
to work on time consistently
has an edge. It starts in school,
where students who are on
time and attend their classes
tend to use this same skill set
at the workplace and quickly
outperform their peers.
2. Being welcoming,
interactive and self-aware
Employers, particularly in
service industries or with cus-
tomer-facing functions rely on
employees who comfortably
introduce themselves to some-
one whom they meet in per-
son at a business, professional
or social setting. “I hear from
Erin Hooley/Chicago Tribune via TNS
Recyclable plastic can holders made by Eu-
gene’s PakTech are being reused through a
program by Chicago-area breweries.
For Climate, his personal effort to help
stave off climate change.
The effort is rooted in Parker attend-
ing a Climate Reality Project seminar
in 2019, where a simple question was
posed: “What is the highest lever you
can pull to educate people about cli-
mate change?” Beer came to mind.
Even before joining his current em-
ployer — not involved in the effort,
but supportive, Parker said — he was a
beer lover. The intersection of beer and
climate seemed a natural place to start.
“I always thought other people with
while serving in Utah and
South Korea.
Yozamp shared his portable
solar panel ideas with Steve
Nelson, a business acquain-
tance, and financial specialist.
Nelson saw potential in the
product and together the pair
started Zamp Solar.
They first marketed their
products on eBay, but RV
dealerships soon became their
primary market. In those
heady, startup days, Nelson
described Yozamp as “high
energy” and found it a chal-
lenge to keep up with his part-
ner’s plans.
“He was always coming
up with ideas, you can see his
mind was always spinning. He’s
very smart, creative. He has an
engineering brain, a self-taught
engineer,” said Nelson.
Zamp Solar soon became
one of the country’s best-
known brands for power op-
tions in the recreational vehi-
some employers that the skill
of simply knowing how to ac-
knowledge a prospective cus-
tomer and taking the initiative
to interact in person or on the
phone is a skill that often is
lacking,” says Ertle.
3. Ask questions, clarify and
discover
Creative discovery skills
are essential in many industry
sectors. It drives product and
idea advancement, customer
experience, service, and better
sales. The ability and comfort
of consistently asking ques-
tions to trouble shoot, under-
stand and create can advance
careers and the business alike.
Let’s consider how these
skills transfer in a workplace.
For example, the biotechnol-
ogy industry is a highly reg-
NOW’S THE TIME TO PLAN AHEAD
WITH LIFE INSURANCE
more power were taking care of it and
seems that wasn’t the case,” said Parker,
42. “I felt I needed to do something. l
didn’t know what.”
In October 2021, he launched Craft
For Climate, which had a mission, but
no real plan. Parker considered staging
a craft beer festival with a climate edu-
cation thrust, but wasn’t sure that would
result in meaningful change. Then he
learned of Ecofriendly Beer Drinker,
a New England operation that recy-
cles plastic beer tops in Massachusetts,
Rhode Island and Vermont. The pro-
gram estimates 88% of plastic tops put in
recycling bins never wind up recycled.
The program “seemed replicable in
Chicago,” Parker said. “And something
people should be doing.”
Oregon company’s packaging
The plastic tops, manufactured from
high-density polyethylene by Pak-
Tech of Eugene, have become a pop-
ular means for packaging craft beer
in recent years. Though the plastic
is recyclable and used in an array of
other products, the vast majority wind
up not recycled. Many are thrown
cle space. Yozamp and Nelson
produced a number of prod-
ucts, and in 2015 brought the
production of the panels to
Bend from overseas factories.
away and even those put in recycling
bins wind up in landfills by slipping
through the recycling sorting ma-
chines or else being contaminated by
other recyclables, such as glass. Chi-
cago has a particularly abysmal recy-
cling rate, stuck at less than 10%, the
city said last year.
Parker contacted Rob Vandenabeele,
founder of Ecofriendly Beer Drinker, for
guidance, and learned Adam Dickens,
an Elmhurst candle maker, was also in-
terested in replicating the project here.
Craft for Climate has recruited more
than 40 Chicago breweries and beer
shops to collect the PakTech holders and
take them to four larger collections hubs:
Half Acre and Temperance breweries,
environmental education nonprofit
SCARCE in Addison and Heartland
Beverage beer distributor in St. Charles.
Finally, the Resource Center, a 47-year-
old composting and recycling nonprofit
on Chicago’s South Side, picks them up
and ensures they’re recycled.
“By keeping them together and get-
ting them to an end buyer, we know it
doesn’t end up in the landfill,” Parker
said.
XPON and has a market cap
of $25.5 million.
Reflecting on his business
career, Yozamp said a reason
for his success was knowing
when to leave certain tasks to
experts in their field. “I was
smart enough to surround
myself with people smarter
than me,” Yozamp said. “Peo-
ple that can assist me with de-
velopment, so I reached out
to the right people to make a
vision a reality.”
The switch to lithium
Solar panels had become
a hot commodity, but there
was another part of the power
business that seemed to offer
greater market growth: the
lithium battery pack. Yozamp
decided that part of the mar-
ket needed his full attention.
With lithium batteries his
new focus, Yozamp sold his
share of the company to Nel-
son in 2016. He soon launched
a new company, Expion360,
which specializes in building
battery packs. Expion360 went
public earlier this year on the
NASDAQ exchange, opening
the door to financing the com-
pany’s next big projects, in-
cluding a lithium cell plant. It
trades under the ticker symbol
Employee options
He hopes the expanding
business operations will lead
to increased benefits for his
employees, including stock
options and matching 401k
plans. Down the line, he wants
to open a day care center for
his employees with small chil-
dren. Yozamp plans to em-
ploy 300 people at his lithium
plant, a number that would
make it the fifth largest em-
ulated industry which drives
the conditions on which re-
search and production is con-
ducted. It requires precision,
interaction, and creativity.
Ertle points out that when a
biotech employee begins their
entry level position their job
may involve sanitizing equip-
ment. This includes metic-
ulous attention to detail and
the ability to utilize a chain of
command to sign off on pro-
cedures to ensure there is no
contamination. This requires
attendance, the ability to inter-
act well, follow directions pre-
cisely and to ask questions and
clarify. These skills get progres-
sively more important as their
work becomes more technical.
The better someone is at these
skills, the more prepared they
are to move ahead in a highly
regulated environment.
As we look at more new
candidates struggle with some
of these skills, you can’t blame
ployer in Redmond.
The product line beyond
the RV and marine space will
also expand. Yozamp sees a
day when Expion360 batteries
are in homes and businesses,
filling in power gaps when
the electricity goes out or so-
lar battery storage is needed.
A focus on green technology
and a phasing out of dated
power systems such as lead
acid batteries are other bene-
fits, he said.
As for his sleep apnea ma-
chine, it’s still plugged in on a
nightly basis at home or when
camping by Oregon’s lakes.
But his silent solar power and
lithium battery inventions
have been game changers
since that fateful night by Lit-
tle Lava Lake — those mid-
dle-of-the-night disruptions
from neighbors are a thing of
the past.
█
Reporter: 541-617-7818,
mkohn@bendbulletin.com
the younger generation. These
are not innate skills -they must
be taught, and we’ve clearly
been slacking off. Mentors,
training and integrating soft
skill development into educa-
tion are needed early on to de-
velop muscle memory to pre-
pare those who are next in line
for the workforce.
█
Katy Brooks is the executive director
of the Bend Chamber of Commerce.
She can be reached at Katy@
bendchamber.org
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