Kickstart: A record draw

The next NPE is headed toward a record.

At the space draw for NPE2024, set for May 6-10, 2024, in Orlando, Fla., more than 1,100 exhibitors snapped up 1.02 million square feet of space for 1,259 booths for the event from the Plastics Industry Association.

That compares with 982,000 square feet sold at the space draw for NPE2018.

The association had sold more than 1.2 million square feet of exhibit space for NPE2021, but that event was canceled due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

"NPE2024 is made for the plastics industry," Glenn Anderson, chief operating officer for the association, said in a news release. "NPE is our forum, our community, our showroom, our global marketplace and our platform to do business, learn, connect and be inspired."

NPE takes place in three halls spread across two buildings of the Orange County Convention Center. The in-person space draw is the primary process to buy space for the five-day event, although exhibitors can still apply for remaining space. NPE2018 ended up selling a total of 1.2 million square feet of exhibition space by its opening day.

The humble PET bottle may find itself in the middle of a sustainability tug-of-war with both bottle makers and textile companies eager to access its recycling stream.

As PN's Jim Johnson writes from the Plastics Recycling Conference in Maryland this week, Andrew Brown, the head of plastics and recycling at research firm Wood MacKenzie, says the textile and packaging industries will go head-to-head to access recycled PET for future products.

"As the bottle industry goes more bottle-to-bottle, the textiles industry is now looking at how can we take that value chain and essentially make it more circular," Brown said.

Recycled PET is used in textiles that go into clothing, automotive seating and carpet. But commitments by brand owners to create more sustainable packaging means that the material will have even higher demand from rigid plastics.

That will also require steps by industry to recover more PET, he said.

Of course one big way to collect more plastics for recycling — and keep it from being littered and ending up where it doesn't belong — is to make sure people have a place to properly dispose of it.

Project Stop, a waste collection system supported by materials supplier Borealis that launched in 2017, reports that by the end of 2022 it had provided waste management services to more than 300,000 people across three cities in Indonesia, most for the first time.

Our sister paper Sustainable Plastics writes that Project Stop built five waste processing facilities and collected more than 40,000 metric tons of waste, including more than 5,000 tonnes of plastics.

Participating rates in communities with the new collection programs range from 50 percent up to 87 percent of the population. In addition to helping reduce trash in the environment, Project Stop says it has created 333 full-time jobs.