Four additional conferences have been added to the lineup of collocated events at NPE2009, set for June 22-26 at Chicago's McCormick Place, giving the triennial international plastics trade show an even broader platform.
The Society of the Plastics Industry Inc., the Washington-based sponsor of NPE, announced the additions on Dec. 16. They include:
* A Latin American Plastics conference, produced by B2B Portales Inc.'s Tecnología del Plastico and Conversón magazines that will be conducted entirely in Spanish. The conference will focus on trends, opportunities and technologies to improve the competitiveness of the Latin American plastics industry.
* PET Strategies Plus, produced by Packaging Strategies.
* Coatings for Plastics, produced by the Federation of Societies for Coatings Technology.
* A time compression conference and exposition, produced by Gardner Publications Inc. that will focus on technologies for rapid product design and development.
``SPI has transformed NPE into a vast, multifaceted international convocation that will address the business and technical interests of the entire range of industry professionals,'' Gene Sanders, vice president of trade shows at SPI, said in a news release.
The four conferences join two others that had previously agreed to collocate at NPE2009 — the Society of Plastics Engineers' Antec 2009 technical conference and the MoldMaking Expo produced by Gardner Publications.
All six conferences, as well as SPI's Business of Plastics educational forum, will take place in McCormick West, which also will house a pavilion for emerging technologies and an international plastics design competition.
NPE2009 is expected to have 2,000 exhibitors, with more than a third of them from outside the United States.