THE PLASTICIZER MONTHLY NEWSLETTER COLUMBIA RIVER SECTION May Edition 2010 Volume XX, Number 5 On-Line SPE Social Network Keep up with Plastics professionals from the NW http://spenorthwest.ning.com Its Free • Check it out Save The Date! Columbia River Chapter Annual Golf Outing is June 4 th , 2010! Fax. Email. Voicemail. Band internet connection. De- layed email responses. “Where did the micro- wave from the lunch room go?” Meeting. Another meeting. You know those days. Just not enough time sometimes. Well, SPE can help you out on one day in particular coming up. Friday, June 4 th is our annual SPE/SPI Golf Tournament. How about a day crush- ing drives, sinking 15 foot putts, playing the dog-leg on purpose, and using your ball mark repair tool all day instead of your phone? Sounds good doesn’t it? I mean, even if your ball leaves the fairway, you get a little sandy, or even over shoot the green, at least you can avoid the florescent lights of your office for a day. So, this year, think of a fel- low company or group you would like to challenge, flip through your contacts and see who could join you for great day of “work”…on the course! You fellow SPE board mem- bers are anxious to “working” with all of you June 4 th ! See you then, John Mark Baldwin President Columbia River Chapter Your Opinion Matters A s we continue into the new year we look forward to grow- ing and continually improving our SPE Chapter. One of our priorities will be to better understand the needs of our members. We believe that the best way to understand is by receiv- ing feedback from the SPE body – that means YOU. Please let us know how we can improve: Membership: What subjects would you like cov- ered at our monthly meetings? How can we better serve our members? If you are not actively a member, what is preventing you from joining? Education: What are your education needs within your company? Would you support educational seminars? Are you interested in a resource guide for local Plastics education? Email your comments to: [email protected]
Transcript
The PlasTicizerM o n t h ly n e w sl e t t e r
Co lu M b i a r i v e r seC t i o nMay edition 2010volume XX, number 5
On-line sPe social Network
Keep up with Plastics professionals from the NW
http://spenorthwest.ning.comIts Free • Check it out
save The Date!columbia river chapter annual Golf Outing is June 4th, 2010!
Fax. Email. Voicemail. Band internet connection. De-layed email responses. “Where did the micro-wave from the lunch room go?” Meeting. Another meeting.
You know those days. Just not enough time sometimes. Well, SPE can help you out on one day in particular coming up. Friday, June 4th is our annual SPE/SPI Golf Tournament.
How about a day crush-
ing drives, sinking 15 foot putts, playing the dog-leg on
purpose, and using your ball mark repair tool all day instead of your phone? Sounds good doesn’t it? I mean, even if your ball leaves the fairway, you
get a little sandy, or even over shoot the green, at least you can avoid the florescent lights of your office for a day.
So, this year, think of a fel-low company or group you
would like to challenge, flip through your contacts and see who could join you for great day of “work”…on the course! You fellow SPE board mem-bers are anxious to “working” with all of you June 4th!
See you then,
John Mark BaldwinPresidentColumbia River Chapter
Your Opinion Mattersas we continue into the new
year we look forward to grow-ing and continually improving
our SPE Chapter. One of our priorities will be to better understand the needs of our members. We believe that the best way to understand is by receiv-ing feedback from the SPE body – that means YOU. Please let us know how we can improve:
Membership: What subjects would you like cov-
ered at our monthly meetings? How can we better serve our
members? If you are not actively a member,
what is preventing you from joining?
education: What are your education needs
within your company? Would you support educational
If you are NOT a member of the SPE , this is what you lose out on each and every month…• Monthly Presentations from top in-
dustry professionals• Local Plant Tours • 12 Month Subscription to Plastics
Engineering Magazine • Expert Advice on Today’s Plastics
Industry Challenges• Membership to a larger, national
plastics resource of experts in all plastic fields
• Playing Golf with your suppliers, competitors and other industry pro-fessionals
• Eat and eat some more!• Drinking beer, wine and socializing.• A chance to win unique raffle prizes
like wine, Victoria Secret items, gift cards, plastic play things, $.
• Meet new clients, create more busi-ness = more money in your pocket and impress your boss.
• Gain inside information of business trends, supply, demand, and employ-ment in the industry.
• Support Educational Scholarships
Most importantly it is a great way to socialize with others in the local plastics industry. If you have any ques-tions regarding membership please let us know.
Join us at the next event!
Please Join Us! sPe has been responsible for supporting the plastics industry and is the gateway to industry trends and information.
By Bill Bregar & Dan HockensmithPLASTICS NEWS STAFF Posted May 11, 2010CLEVELAND (May 11, 5:50 p.m. ET)
Makers of pallets, collapsible shipping containers and totes — used to ship all
types of goods — have a first-hand view of the improving economy, they said at the NA2010 trade show.
Gat Ramon put it simply. “If peo-ple are buying more, you need to move more,” said Ramon, president of Cabka GmbH, a Stuttgart, Germany-based plastic pallet company that also runs North American molding plants in St. Louis and Toronto.
“Why do people need pallets? Be-cause the economy is better. I believe that, in the pallet business, you can tell where the economy is really run-ning well.”
Ramon was among other ex-ecutives from plastic materials-han-dling companies exhibiting at the
show who report their business has begun to pick up as customers get rid of excess inventory and resume new production on the downhill side of the nearly two-year recession.
Cabka’s pallet business abruptly declined in the fall of 2008 and then bounced along in 2009 until rebound-ing sharply in the fourth quarter, Ramon said. Business is solid so far this year.
“If it will stay like this, I’m happy,” he said.
Curt Most, national sales manager of pallets for Orbis Corp., said materi-als handling tracks the general econo-my. “We’ve been following the trends of what you’ve been reading about in the paper, and when things were down, we were down. We’re seeing things slowly coming back,” he said.
John Petrofsky, owner of Exemplary Foam Inc., reports strong business at his
company. “We had the best first quarter ever — best sales, best profit. The econ-omy’s coming back,” he said. “People are buying again. We’re selling more to auto-motive than we have in awhile.”
Elkhart, Ind.-based Exemplary Foam fabricates polyethylene and cross-linked PE foam using water-jet cutting.
The industry converged on Cleve-land for the North American Material Handling & Logistics Show, held April 26-29. Leaders of the trade association that sponsored the show were cau-tiously optimistic.
The Charlotte, N.C.-based Material Handling Industry of America predicts orders for materials-handling equip-ment — which had fallen by 37.4 per-cent in 2009 — will increase between 6 and 8.5 percent in 2010. In addition, the group said shipments of materials-handling equipment — which con-
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Just how is the economy doing? continued...
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tracted by 34.4 percent in 2009 — will grow 1-2 percent in 2010.
“It is indicative that we are headed in the right direction. ‘Up’ is up, and even though it’s a long, slow climb, it feels a whole lot different from the precipitous fall we all experienced” in 2009, John Nofsinger, the association’s CEO, said at an April 27 news confer-ence at the trade show.
Hal Vandiver, MHIA’s vice presi-dent of business development, said a reboot of the U.S. housing market, plus increased orders for consumer goods, medical products, and automotive parts, as well as public works projects, bode well for the industry.
“We’re looking forward to getting into a growth mode in the latter half of 2010, and 2011 holds the most prom-ise,” he said. Economic growth into 2012 is likely to follow a pattern of slight growth, followed by a leveling-off period, followed by slight growth, he said.
But some plastics-related exhibi-tors said automakers and their suppli-ers are being slow to buy new pallets and collapsible containers, since they still have plenty of reusable shipping containers available after a period of sluggish sales. It’s the materials-han-dling version of excess capacity.
Rich Larson, national accounts manager at Milford, Ohio-based Buck-horn Inc., said automakers used to order a series of new containers for a new model launch. Now, car compa-nies and suppliers are retrofitting ex-isting pallets and containers, he said.
The smaller number of suppliers also hurt auto-related business, said Ron Warner, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Composite Technologies Co. LLC in Dayton, Ohio. “You have more Tier 1s and Tier 2s that are not around anymore, and that will impact the need for pallets,” he said.
Larson said the general market for reusable containers and pallets is “still a little behind, but we see it picking up.”
The food market is doing well, Larson said. At the Cleveland show, Buckhorn was showing the Caliber intermediate bulk container, with a liner bag inside, for handling liquid products. Buckhorn is expanding the IBC beyond its core market of tomato
paste, into new segments such as hon-ey, mayonnaise and food flavorings.
“We’re seeing good things happen,” Larson said. “We’ve got some good proj-ects coming this year and if it all comes to fruition, it’ll be a good year.”
Food and retail products are big markets for plastic pallets from Orbis, based in Oconomowoc, Wis., accord-
Just how is the economy doing? continued...
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ing to Most. “Food companies seem to be doing well — slowly but surely they’re coming back,” he said.
Other exhibitors spoke of a move-ment within the materials-handling in-dustry to put cost-cutting lessons they learned from the downturn to good use.
Los Angeles-based plastic crate and pallet manufacturer Rehrig Pa-cific Co. recently stepped up its asset-management efforts for customers including Pepsi Co., Coca-Cola Co., and Sara Lee Corp., said Midwest sales representative Leslie LeMair.
“Different players around the
country use our plastics assets. They’re having a problem retrieving them. They’re experiencing loss rates that are too high to make it profitable for them,” she said.
The company has developed methods customers can use to mini-mize loss and help meet larger sustain-ability goals, she said.
Composite Technologies offers a single-use export pallet for about $10, using its experience in molding recycled plastics, which it compounds in-house. “People are gravitating more toward the lower-cost pallets for non-returnable applications,” Warner said.
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