ORLANDO, FLA. — Paul Benvenuti walks the NPE 2015 show floor in Orlando with purpose. Keep up or be left behind, because this man has a job to do this week, and he's not slowing down.
Benvenuti typically works in purchasing and sales at Commercial Plastic Recycling Inc. in Tampa, but this week he's the tip of the spear on CPR's efforts to gather every bit of plastic scrap they can get their hands on at the show.
And that's quite a lot.
Blue totes. Clear bottle preforms. Green pipe elbows. Pink detergent bottle caps. Black trays. Small white bottles. Medium white bottles. Large white bottles.
And then there's the caps. So many caps. Too many to count. Twenty five or so to a big handful. And who knows how many handfuls are in one of those big brown cardboard boxes called gaylords. Certainly hundreds of thousands of caps by the end of the week, maybe millions. Probably millions.
It's CPR's job to get all of those plastic pieces and parts off of the show floor and processed at its facility about 70 miles away.
“As you can see it's constant motion,” Benvenuti said as he shot down one of the aisles in the West Hall of the Orange County Convention Center.
“Our people here have really stepped up. Very proud our reps that came in from out of town. We've had some family, because this is a family company, and our warehouse guys have come in and the temps have really stepped up,” he said.
CPR (Booth S35067) has more than 30 workers at the Convention Center this week, many of them who are full-time employees of the company. The rest are temporary staff hired for the show.
One of those folks is Joshua Channell, who is in purchasing and sales for CPR's Millwood, W.Va., location.
He's managing one portion of the floor in the West Hall and is responsible for seeing that products made from machines in nine booths are removed.
“We try to stay out of their [exhibitors'] way and stay out of sight and get the material out,” said Channell, who is typically supervising five to seven people at any one time. “The last thing they want are products falling on the floor because they don't have containers to put them in.”