Earlier today, May 17, 2013, Pennsylvania State Representative Frank Dermody (D-33), the Democratic Leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, met with the management and employees at the Harwick, PA facility of Watson Standard, a leading supplier of coatings and adhesives and member of SPI: The Plastics Industry Trade Association.

Pennsylvania State Rep Frank Dermody (left) today toured the Harwick, PA manufacturing facility of Watson Standard with the company’s Wes Horton (center) and Jeff Matty.

Top managers gave Rep. Dermody an organized tour of the plant’s manufacturing area, helping him learn about the physical production processes, as well as the overall business of the company. Plant visits such as this are organized regularly with the support of the Government and Industry Affairs specialists at SPI in order to familiarize legislators with actual operations of companies in America’s diverse plastics business, the third largest sector of American manufacturing.

Among those meeting with Rep. Dermody were Jim Lore, President of Watson Standard, Jeff Matty, VP of regulatory affairs, and Wes Horton,  director of manufacturing. Watson Standard, which was founded in 1902 is a privately held specialty chemical coating and adhesives supplier with its headquarters in Pittsburgh, about 10 miles southwest of the Harwick manufacturing facility.

Certified to the ISO 9001:2008 quality standard, WS focuses on application-based, customer-specific conventional and energy-curable coatings and adhesives for a broad range of applications encompassing rigid, flexible, food, beverage, pharmaceutical, confectionery, and general industrial packaging. Besides its American home market, the company has a global sales and distribution that includes Central and South America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region.

The communication that takes place both during and after plant visits such as Rep. Dermody’s today is invaluable to both sides. Legislators are tasked with creating laws and regulations that directly impact all the manufacturing sectors. It therefore is important that they know as much as possible about actual manufacturing operations, and equally important that manufacturers are able to have input into the government actions that will affect their businesses going forward.

Recognizing this, SPI facilitates plant visits for its member companies, many of which have taken advantage of the opportunity. Further, SPI for some time sponsored “fly-ins” that bring leaders of plastics sector businesses to Washington, D.C. for meetings directly with their legislators and staffers.

The next SPI Fly-In is set for July 24, 2013, but this time it’s not just SPI members coming in. Seven other plastics-related associations are joining in, including: American Chemistry Council, American Composites Manufacturers Association, International Association of Plastics Distribution, Plastic Pipe and Fittings Association, Plastic Pipe Institute, Vinyl Institute, and Western Plastics Association. More Fly-In information here.

A sincere thank-you goes to the folks at BagTheBan.com for producing a brief, easy to read infographic that clearly shows how and why plastic bags are a better choice than paper or reusable shopping bags—for the environment, the economy, and the place where you live.

It’s called The Truth About Plastic Bags, and it lives up to its name with factual, quantitative information on plastic bags relative to litter, source material, recyclability (spoiler alert: 100% recyclable), access to bag recycling, environmental impact (see below), negative impacts of bag bans on retail businesses, and more.

The colorful, multipage infographic is available as a free PDF download that can be easily reprinted and handed to those who mistakenly believe plastic bags make the worst choice when the truth is the exact opposite. Facts are facts.

You can see a sample from The Truth About Plastic Bags below, and you can see it in full and download it here. For more information on plastic bags, visit BagTheBan.com, which is presented by Hilex Poly, a leader in plastic bag recycling and manufacturing.

Much is being written lately about American manufacturing, which of course includes plastics, America’s third largest manufacturing sector. However, the analysis, opinions, and forecasts are far from unanimous. Many analysts say U.S. manufacturing is making a comeback, or is on the verge of a comeback, with reshoring of previously offshored work helping the efforts.

But you are just as likely to see or hear that the uptick in American manufacturing is a glitch, just part of a reflex-like rebound from the recession of 2008-2009, that there are serious obstacles to a major recovery, and that the U.S. is unlikely to ever recover its prominence as a maker of things.

One of the most frequently mentioned obstacles is a lack of skilled workers in the USA. Several recent studies put the number of jobs going unfilled due to employers not being able to find people with the needed skills at about half a million, and probably more. They are not talking about graduate engineers, though they too are scarce, but shop floor, hands-on machine operators, maintenance specialists, and machinists.

The ManpowerGroup’s 2012 Annual Talent Shortage Survey found 33 percent of U.S. employers have difficulty finding skilled workers, an increase from 24 percent in the 2011 survey. The Survey revealed that the 10 hardest jobs to fill are, in order of difficulty: skilled trades, engineers, IT staff, sales reps, accounting/finance staff, drivers, mechanics, nurses, machinists/machine operators, and teachers.

The so-called skills gap could either stop a manufacturing renaissance or slow it down significantly. The good news is that solutions are developing. For example, the federal government is supporting creation of centers for manufacturing excellence around the country, and plastics manufacturers and others are working with educational institutions such as community colleges to give workers the skills they need.

One solution, however, deserves more attention. “The central answer to the mismatch between jobs and employment is a 21^st-century apprenticeship program,” according to a recent article in the Washington Post. The authors, Stuart E. Eizenstat, chief domestic policy adviser to President Jimmy Carter and undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration, and Robert I. Lerman, an economics professor at American University and a fellow at the Urban Institute, make a strong case for apprenticeships.

There are a number of existing manufacturing apprenticeship programs in operation, but with about half a million jobs open that can’t be filled, more are needed. The article points out that 55 to 70 percent of all young people in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland enter apprenticeships. To be sure, those countries have long traditions of guilds and craftwork and you could say apprenticeships are in their culture. But in Australia apprenticeships have tripled since 1996, and in England they have increased by a factor of 10 since 1990 to more than 500,000 participants last year.

As a plastics industry journalist in Europe, I visited numerous plastics processing facilities, and I saw apprentices at work in many of them, particularly in Germany. Those training programs are as normal and common there as they are rare and unusual in the USA. Top managers of the processing companies told me the apprentice programs are virtually always three-way partnerships among government, education, and the manufacturer — and they always spoke of the program and its results positively. I recall one manager, puzzled by my questions about the apprentice system, stopped for a moment and then told me, in a serious tone, that those youngsters were the future of his company.

My interviews were almost always at small to medium plastics processing companies, almost all plastics molders and moldmakers. The larger companies also have apprentice programs. In every case, the managers emphasized that the learning was absolutely practical, based on the specifics of processing plastics and toolmaking. They stressed how, following a brief startup period, the apprentices did real work that the company needed, not made-up training exercises. The learning provided by the educational institution likewise was driven by what the apprentices would be doing following their training. The keyword for the apprentice training is practical.

Manufacturing accounts for 20 percent of all German jobs, despite a high level of automation. Manufacturing is about 10 percent of the U.S. workforce. Germany as a country is strongly focused on exports and regularly enjoys a trade surplus. By contrast, America’s large trade deficit seems to have become a permanent part of economic reports.

Making apprenticeships an effective component of U.S. manufacturing will require a cultural shift. Eizenstat and Lerman note that government in America spends more than $300 billion on colleges and universities, while its outlays for apprenticeship programs are less than $40 million. Many Americans believe that a college diploma is essential to success, that production facilities are terrible workplaces, and that a career in manufacturing lacks prestige and is not financially rewarding.

As everyone in manufacturing knows, the truth is quite the opposite. The apprentice graduates with a sense of pride and the identity that comes with joining an occupational group. And the financial considerations are very different. Unlike a full-time student, the apprentice earns money while learning and training, does not accumulate what increasingly is a heavy burden of student loan debt, has not been unemployed, and most likely will not be.

In a major redesign of its marinade product line, Goya Foods, which is the largest Hispanic-owned U.S. food company and a leading supplier of Latin American food and condiments, has converted its 12oz (355ml) and 24.5oz (725ml) marinade bottles from glass to polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles supplied by Amcor Rigid Plastics.

Switching from glass (left) bottles to PET plastics bottles, Goya Foods gained many advantages, including substantially reduced environmental impact.

Amcor’s LatinAmerica group designed the hot-fill bottles, including a new shrink-wrap label, and the result is a vibrant, clean package that is at once modern and elegant. Apart from the visual appeal, Amcor’s press release notes other benefits: “The hot fill bottle delivers significant performance and cost advantages including portability, reduced breakage, and light weight, along with sustainability benefits such as recyclability, reduced transportation costs, and a significantly reduced carbon footprint.

During the last 70 or so years that plastics have been replacing glass — and metals, paper, and fabrics — the replacement decision was generally not based on any single plastics advantage. One benefit often was cited as the key factor, but virtually always, it was a combination of benefits that spurred the change, as it is with Goya’s decision on these bottles.

Goya is realizing substantial environmental benefits by changing the  bottles from glass to plastics. Amcor says using PET in the 24.5oz bottle results in a reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of 61.4%, compared with glass. Additionally, using PET means 52% more 24.5oz bottles are in a truckload, which eliminates still more GHG. Such environmental benefits may vary in quantity but  generally they are typical when plastics replace other materials, a fact that environmental activists and groups should appreciate, or at least notice.

“In the end, lightweight PET not only delivered a major savings in terms of freight cost but also gave us the glass-like appearance and the shelf appeal to maintain our brand image,” said Joseph Perez, senior vice president of Goya Foods. Both bottle sizes are custom designed for both ambient fill (up to 140°F) and hot fill (up to 185°F) applications and are seamlessly integrated into existing glass filling lines with minimal adjustment, according to Perez.

Goya Foods, which offers more that 2,200 Latin American food products, also plans to replace glass with PET in an existing 12oz juice beverage line. Perez said the conversion to hot fill PET is expected by the summer.

The new Goya PET bottles are the first to feature Amcor’s new Origami hot-fill technology, incorporating six flat panels to counteract vacuum that occurs in hot filled containers and to maintain structural strength and integrity. The flat surfaces enhance gripping and consumer handling.

Plastics professionals from every part of the plastics value chain should mark November 4-6, 2013 on their calendars to be certain they don’t miss the just-announced inaugural Global Plastics Summit at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Chicago. Hosted collaboratively by SPI: The Plastics Industry Trade Association, and IHS, the global source of information and analytics regarding the global chemical industry, the Global Plastics Summit will bring together decision makers, thought leaders, and technical experts from across the plastics industry, oil and gas, all areas of American manufacturing, and the experts from IHS and SPI.

The SPI/IHS Global Plastics Summit, will be held November 4-6, 2013, in Chicago, Illinois

During the Summit’s three days, those leaders will share their insights on the market outlook for key polymer and raw materials, technical and product developments, innovations, challenges, and the opportunities facing the dynamic plastics industry, all the issues that impact plastic producers, converters, distributors and all related industry professionals.

“The abundant feedstock of shale gas is changing the global landscape for plastics manufacturing,” said William R. “Bill” Carteaux, president and chief executive officer of SPI. “It’s critical that America’s manufacturing leaders share their insights on how today’s evolving supply chain, reshoring trends and growing consumer demands for cleaner, greener manufacturing are changing our core business models.”

“As the industry leader in delivering the world’s most comprehensive chemical insight, market information, and consulting services, IHS is pleased to partner with such a respected organization as SPI in order to offer this event to the industry,” said Dave Witte, senior vice president and general manager of IHS Chemical.

“Our combined practical industry knowledge and insight, makes it possible for us to build a stimulating, timely and strategic program to help America’s manufacturers reposition their companies for the future,” said Carteaux. “Plastics manufacturers must understand these developments in order to capture new opportunities in both domestic and international markets.”

Carteaux also noted that solution-oriented workshops will hone in on manufacturing innovation, best practices and emerging new markets across the supply chain. “We’ll be asking participants to think beyond keynotes and get something done,” says Carteaux.

“The U.S. plastics industry is on the cusp of the next wave of domestic expansion,” said Nick Vafiadis, senior director of global polyolefins and plastics at IHS Chemical. “U.S. plastics manufacturers are becoming global suppliers at a level we’ve never seen before. These are interesting and exciting times for producers and this event will be an unparalleled, collaborative experience.”

To this long-time observer of the American plastics industry, the Global Plastics Summit is exceptionally well timed to clarify the issues and impacts of America’s abundant shale gas on plastic materials producers and processors, as well as on the brand owners who rely on plastics to manufacture their products or to make the packaging for their products, or both.

SPI recently created its Brand Owners Council in recognition of the critical position brand owners occupy in the plastics value chain. SPI’s existing Councils include the Processors Council, the Material Suppliers Council, and the Equipment and Machinery Council. Dealing with key issues such as zero waste, sustainability, and product safety, brand owners will be highly interested in participation at the Global Plastics Summit.

Plastics professionals, including brand owners who rely on plastics, should not miss the chance to chart their business future at the first Global Plastics Summit in Chicago, November 4-6, 2013. More information can be found at www.GlobalPlasticsSummit.com, and a full agenda and registration details will be forthcoming as the event draws near.

“From resin suppliers and equipment makers to processors and brand owners, SPI is proud to represent all facets of the U.S. plastics industry,” Bill Carteaux said. “Our most recent economic reports show that the plastics industry as a whole is resilient, and has come through the recession significantly better than other U.S. manufacturing sectors.”