"On a three-year cycle like [NPE], you keep hoping for the best. But, the closer we got, it increasingly looked to us like the stars were not going to align," said Conrad Bessemer, president and CEO of auxiliary equipment maker Novatec Inc.

The NPE2021 show, the biggest plastics fair in North America, is canceling the in-person portion of the trade fair scheduled for May in Florida because of the coronavirus pandemic, the organizer announced Jan. 5.

A major NPE2021 exhibitor is pulling out, warning that it believes the May trade show, the largest plastics fair in North America, risks becoming a superspreader event. Novatec Inc. urged organizers to cancel the show.