SPE: A-NZ Newsletter by the President
May I wish you and your family a Happy New Year.
After our webinar on the Economic Outlook for 2022 in December 2021, I was very optimistic about the prospects for our plastics industry in 2022. Obviously, I did not know by that time the actions by our Federal and States/Territories Governments of the last weeks with respect to COVID-19 and, I must admit, I had not included the currently developing events included in one of the risk mitigation scenarios for 2022.
It looks like 2022 might be a more difficult than was expected at that webinar. Let’s hope that we can control the developing situation, so we can work on innovation, developing new products, onshoring and focus on building our markets and capabilities.
Have you noticed that SPE is changing? Have a look at the global website www.4spe.org and see what is coming up under Events. One of these events is dealing with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Who would have thought only a couple of years ago that SPE would have such a non-technical subject being dealt with as an important issue for our industry to pay attention to? I am glad that such a subject is now being highlighted and expect that more items from the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) area will find their way to our events in future as well.
Your local SPE chapter is changing also as we have now a Chair covering Sustainability (Russell Speight), we have included a position on our Committee of Management for a non-profit (Ricki Hersburgh from Plastic Oceans Australasia) and we have provided more prominence to States such as NSW (with Carlos Demnati), QLD (with Roger Cater) and SA (with Jeremy Curtin), other than Victoria, the traditional base of most of our activities.
By doing this we expect that we can provide better information on more interesting subjects to our large stakeholder community. See our current calendar of events for Australia on our website: www.plastics.org.au
In addition to our “Annual Plastics and Circular Economy Conference” in November, we will also bring a new one-day event to you on “Plastics in Medical Applications” which will be held on Tuesday 7th June and be co-located with Australian Manufacturing Week organised by AMTIL at the ICC in Sydney.
We hope that all our events will contain our well-attended industry networking sessions and be in-person again, but many will include a hybrid element as a webinar as well.
We look forward to 2022 being a strong year for our plastics industry notwithstanding COVID-19.
Han Michel
President
SPE: A-NZ Section Ltd
Mobile: 0416 168 25
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