Mexico City — Keeping abreast of technology is vital if Mexico's plastics industry is to remain competitive, the industry's leader believes.
Speaking on the eve of the 22nd edition of Plastimagen Mexico, Aldimir Torres Arenas said the industry is constantly on the lookout for the very latest in technology and investing millions of dollars a year in new equipment.
"The Mexican plastics industry is highly competitive," Torres said at an Anipac general assembly March 28.
"But we believe competitiveness goes hand in glove with sustainability, and that's why we signed on to the [Ellen MacArthur-inspired] Global Commitment for a New Plastics Economy," he added.
Anipac (Asociación Nacional de Industrias del Plástico AC) is the leading plastics industry association in Mexico. It joined the Ellen MacArthur initiative last fall and has been promoting the project at every opportunity since.
Torres said that "as far as we plastics industrialists are concerned a plastics product, such as a straw, a polystyrene cup or a PET bottle found in the garbage is not waste but a highly prized raw material that has been discarded out of ignorance."
"Plastics is an important industry," he added. "To talk about the total number of tons we process does not even begin to describe the industry we represent."
He said Mexico's plastics industry generates $30 billion a year in sales and employs 800,000.
At the same event, José Navarro Meneses, managing director of Plastimagen organizer Tarsus México SA de CV, said the show's 14 national pavilions would be filled by delegations from Germany, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Spain, the United States, India, Italy, Portugal, Qatar, Switzerland, Taiwan and Turkey, with the 14th pavilion occupied by Anipac.
"As international plastics industry trade shows go, Plastimagen is one of the biggest and is certainly among the top 10," Navarro told Plastics News before the show kicked off.
On the subject of sustainability, he said that "it seems to me that as a society we don't understand that when we use a [once only] plastics product, we also have a duty to dispose of it properly so that it can be used to make something else."