Registration Now Open for the SPC Spring Meeting!

We are excited to announce that registration for the eighth annual SPC Spring Meeting is now open! The meeting will be held April 23-25, 2012 at the Fairmont Royal York in downtown Toronto. This year’s meeting will feature two days of plenary and breakout sessions, a welcome reception, and small group dinners on key topics of interest for the packaging industry. Attendees are also invited to join tours in the Toronto area, including a tour of Peel Integrated Waste Management, the largest facility of its kind in Canada that houses a single stream MRF, a waste transfer station, and an organics composting plant; and the Steam Whistle Brewery, a microbrewery that was named one of Toronto’s greenest buildings. Please visit the event website for additional event details and registration information, and stay tuned as we announce the complete agenda in the coming months. We hope you will join us and over 300 packaging and sustainability professionals for the leading packaging event of the year!

In addition, a few spots for meeting hosts remain. As a host, your company will be featured in all meeting promotional materials and will receive two complimentary registrations. We invite SPC member companies to contact GreenBlue Director of External Relations Erin Malec for further details on hosting benefits.

ESP Mexico City Recap and Upcoming ESP Dates

Project Manager Minal Mistry taught the inaugural session of the newly updated Essentials of Sustainable Packaging (ESP) course in Mexico City on November 15th. This public session was presented with the support of Asociación Mexicana de Envase y Embalaje (AMEE). The session was well attended with 26 students, some of whom hailed from as far away as Monterrey, Tijuana, and Argentina. Seven SPC member companies were represented, along with nine AMEE members. There was significant interest in end-of-life and recovery of packaging materials as Mexico is embarking on efforts to implement material separation and processing for secondary markets.

In addition, the first session in Hong Kong originally scheduled for November has been rescheduled for February 22-23, 2012. This session will be presented with the support of the Hong Kong Productivity Council (HKPC). The course is limited to 25 students and registration is now open via HKPC. You can find the course brochure and registration information here. We will be conducting a Train the Trainer event in conjunction with the public session in Hong Kong to prepare a small cadre of instructors that will present the course on our behalf over the next two years via our training partner Sustainable Packaging Ltd. This is intended to be a bi-directional exchange of ideas and intelligence as related to sustainability in packaging.

Sustainability for Store Brands Packaging Workshop

In collaboration with Store Brands Decisions (SBD), the SPC will be co-presenting a Sustainability for Store Brands Packaging Workshop at the upcoming Store Brands Decisions Innovation & Marketing Summit in Chicago, IL. The workshop will take place on February 29, 2012 and will immediately precede the Summit, which will be taking place March 1-2. The session, which will be a distilled version of the SPC’s Essentials of Sustainable Packaging curriculum, will be a three-hour educational workshop that will address the needs of retailer store brands and their product suppliers. Workshop attendees will receive a certificate of completion co-signed by the SPC and SBD. Registration information will soon be available on the Summit webpage, but please contact Project Manager Anne Bedarf with any questions in the meantime.