The International Plastics Design Competition will mark the first time the long-standing design competitions organized by SPI’s Alliance of Plastics Processors (APP) and its predecessor groups will be open worldwide and to virtually any type of design.

SPI said the competition will extend its reach to new categories including packaging products, bioplastics, nanocomposites, and products that address energy efficiency and sustainability.

In the past, the National Plastics Design Competition was mostly restricted to U.S. entries and limited to load-bearing parts, enclosures and structural parts. The annual competitions were started in 1974.

SPI recently canceled the product design contest that had been scheduled for September, and now the trade group is focusing on promoting next June’s event.

“This is a huge audience that is vastly different from past years. It will give them the opportunity to be on display for potential customers and mold makers,” said an NPE spokesman.

But locating the show at NPE isn’t a guaranteed boost for the design competition, suggested one former SPI staff member who had been involved in the conference and design contest for several years.

“The APP discussed participating at NPE for years with always the same outcome: Too expensive, too big, no time to coordinate,” said the former SPI staff member. “It was felt that there was little value to the exhibitors [because] competition displays are not near booths,” and because, typically, few designers and original equipment manufacturers attend NPE.

Less than half the APP parts competition winners exhibited at NPE 2006, and the traffic through the parts pavilion was extremely light, said the source.

SPI said it was unsure whether the design competition will continue to be an international competition in non-NPE years, or whether it would be a stand-alone competition or paired with another event.

Attendance at conferences that featured the design contests routinely drew more than 500 participants from the late 1980s through the early 1990s. Attendance declined to 275 in 1998 and to around 160 last year.

The number of entries, which twice in the early 1990s topped 90, declined to 31 in 2007 with 12 of those from one company.

“As a showcase for innovative engineering, [the International Plastics Design Competition] will complement other programs and events that are also new to NPE and focused on advanced technologies,” Bill Carteaux, president and chief executive officer of SPI, said in a statement.