North American Plastics Alliance turns 5

The North American Plastics Alliance (NAPA) – a partnership between the continent’s four leading plastics industry trade associations to enhance sustainability and support growth – celebrated its fifth anniversary last month.

Made up of the Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI), the plastics division of the American Chemistry Council (ACC), the Canadian Plastics Industry Association (CPIA), and Mexico’s Asociación Nacional de Industrias del Plástico, NAPA is designed to be a forum that allows the groups to move the entire plastics industry forward through coordinated advocacy, product stewardship programs, and other efforts aimed at increasing plastics recycling and energy recovery throughout North America.

“The story of the plastics industry in North America can be divided into two periods: before NAPA and after NAPA,” said SPI president and CEO Bill Carteaux. “The after-NAPA period has been altogether more productive and more beneficial for each of our organizations’ members and our nation’s plastics industries. This year NAPA diligently enhanced its outreach efforts and more effectively integrated ANIPAC into its ongoing operations. The results have been a more complete and unified voice that has begun to reverberate throughout North America on behalf of all its plastics manufacturers.”

NAPA concentrates its efforts in four specific areas: outreach to promote better understanding of plastics’ economic, social and environmental contributions; advocacy to encourage public policy that supports the growth of the plastics industry and to defend against specific product attacks by providing factual information while fostering innovation; energy recovery and recycling to facilitate increased recycling and recovery of plastics’ stored energy content; and pellet containment to extend wide-scale adoption of Operations Clean Sweep throughout North America and beyond.

“For plastics companies in North America, NAPA quadruples the value proposition of joining one of the four NAPA-aligned organizations,” said Carol Hochu, president and CEO of CPIA. “Our members benefit from having a built-in advocate for their business throughout the continent, in addition to in the country where they’re headquartered, and NAPA offers them access to resources they can use to grow their business globally.”