Peter DelGado: The 68th Annual IAPD Convention was a full and exciting week!

Jim Richards: We had productive supplier/customer meetings and committee meetings throughout the week. The Government Relations Educational Session offered valuable insights into what the next four years might hold for our industry.

On Tuesday, the PAC Reception was a great success, raising over US$7,000 in contributions. Thank you all for your generosity — these funds will go directly toward supporting our legislative efforts to advance the performance plastics industry.

DelGado: We were thrilled to welcome new members and first-time attendees at their reception, followed by reconnecting with old friends at the Welcome Reception.

Networking has been a key part of this week, especially at Wednesday’s connecX trade show, which provided excellent opportunities to explore new ideas and partnerships.

Matt Mayberry’s keynote during the Wednesday General Session had some great takeaways on transformational leadership.

Richards: Wednesday night’s Howard J. Natal, IAPD Charitable Foundation Fundraiser was another highlight. We’re thankful to report that US$3,800 was raised to support future charitable endeavors in 2025 and beyond.

I’m looking forward to continuing the conversation from the Breakfast Brainstorm, where we discussed the future of the IAPD Charitable Foundation.

DelGado: Finally, congratulations once again to our individual award winners — Mark Trepanier, Mike Howser and Deborah Ragsdale — who we’re proud to recognize for their outstanding contributions to the performance plastics industry.

We have a special video for you that can be viewed by scanning the QR code on this page.

Congratulations to all of our member companies who were recognized this morning for their excellence in Education, Sustainability and Marketing. Thank you for setting the bar for our industry.

On Wednesday, we shared with you the work and accomplishments of the past year. Hopefully during the trade show, you visited the various tables representing the programs of IAPD and learned about all that is available to you as members. All these programs are aligned with IAPD’s strategy, and how we provide member value and advance the industry.

Now, let’s take a look at this coming year.

Richards: We will continue to build on our core IAPD programs in 2025.

Women in Plastics, which has grown into one of our flagship programs, will host events both in-person and virtually again this year.

GenerationNext continues to grow and we’ll focus more on attracting the next generation of talent into our performance plastics industry.

Our educational offerings continue to be one of the most popular benefits that our members take advantage of. We’ll continue the Plastics Live Training sessions in 2025 and expand our webinar offerings.

Our Government Relations efforts have taken a huge step forward over the past year as we’ve worked together with our new partner, OGR … and we are just getting started!

Delgado: Yes, we are Jim! IAPD is undergoing a shift in perspective on what we will offer members versus nonmembers through its website, pulling back what used to be available to both and making most things available to members only.

With the launch of the new Members’ Only Area, IAPD has created a single area on the website where you will find everything that you are looking for in a simple navigation-friendly page. Whether you are looking for IAPD’s Top 26 Markets white papers or the IAPD News archives; the association’s Bylaws; past annual conventions’ attendee lists; or any of our archives of webinars or magazine articles; just about anything that IAPD has to offer can be found in this new area of the website.

Even more exciting is that later this year we will launch, for members’ only, a new artificial intelligence tool, similar to ChatGPT but focused on performance plastics and IAPD. This new tool was designed by AI expert Sam Richter, who presented at our June Leadership Development Conference. Sam spent hours pretraining it, using over 10 years of IAPD’s Performance Plastics magazines, all the materials that are within IAPD’s website and information from general searches and databases. It will be kept up to date as an interactive tool that can answer your question about IAPD and the performance plastics industry.

Richards: We are also proud that at this convention we officially launched the new Performance Plastics Magazine & News Page that reflects the new digital strategy for the Performance Plastics magazine and e-newsletter, IAPD News. The new page hosts the digital issue of the magazine. It includes a new industry news feed, along with the current and past digital issues of the magazine, bonus content, more timely reader interest stories and employee news and social media feeds to drive readers’ engagement.

Members can submit stories about their employees or companies directly for posting on the page, or they can add a hashtag on their LinkedIn posts. By posting with these hashtags, your posts will automatically be pulled into IAPD’s newsfeed. Select posts will be used for the print publication as well.

DelGado: Wow, so many exciting things coming in 2025. A big change coming this year is that we will retire the IAPD Scholarship Program in its current format. The Board feels that the program, which precedes most of us in this room, has run its course. This has been a discussion among IAPD Boards for the past eight years.

The 2024-2025 scholarship year will be the final year of the program. The program has a long and rich legacy in IAPD. We celebrate all the good that the program has done, and the members that have contributed to the success of the program over the years. A special thank you goes out to the many people over the years who have served on the Scholarship Committee. Your passion and countless hours are so appreciated.

But Jim, the end of one era is the beginning of another, right?

Richards: It sure is Peter. Although the current program is being retired, the IAPD Charitable Foundation will continue. Over the last four years, the IAPD Board and the Scholarship Committee worked to integrate the scholarship program into IAPD’s overall workforce development strategy. We hope to continue to do this with the Charitable Foundation going forward. The Scholarship and Fundraising Committees met yesterday morning with the Executive Committee to brainstorm ways the Charitable Foundation can best benefit IAPD and its members in the future. This will be a primary focus for us in the coming months.

DelGado: Another thing we will enhance in 2025 is the work of the IAPD Membership Committee. I talked at the Wednesday General Session about creating value for our members. We will continue to further study what we offer members versus nonmembers. Our members pay dues, invest in the association and serve on the board, committees and task forces. They should get the most value. Further recommendations to the IAPD Board will be forthcoming in 2025 on how we can continue to create value for IAPD members, while enticing more new members to join the association.

You will also see that the association will survey members in 2025. As we look to create more value for you, we need your input. The feedback may be about certain programs or resources, or it may be about membership value in general. We all need to think about what we need from our industry association and what that looks like in the years ahead. When you see these surveys, please share your thoughts with us.

Many in this room participated some years back in the Joint Distributors and Manufacturers Council that produced the Distributors and Manufacturers’ Competencies and Expectations resource. While the core principles of the relationships between distributors and manufacturers remain the same, it is time to revisit the competencies and expectations document and make updates. IAPD will pull a group together next year to work on that project.

Richards: Lastly, and most importantly, the two new task forces that are launching in the fourth quarter of 2024 will be in full swing in 2025: the Workforce Development Task Force and the Sustainability Task Force.

You heard yesterday about the incredible amount of work that was done this year in gathering input and direction as we lead into the launch of these two important task groups. We also shared about the current programs that are tied to work in these areas. What is important to remember is that Sustainability, Workforce Development and Government Relations, are things that are most important to the short and long-term health of the performance plastics industry. They are also the top priorities identified by you, the member company leaders. Therefore, they are the priorities of IAPD.

The 2024-2025 Workforce Development Task Force has had a great response on its call for volunteers and will start its work shortly after the convention. We look forward to having interim updates out to the membership on its work.

DelGado: Sustainability has been and will continue to be a top priority for IAPD. As noted yesterday, our Environmental Committee has done an outstanding job this year with its article series on ESG. Additionally, they have a line-up of webinars already delivered in the ESG Webinar Series.

As we continue to build our work in sustainability, we will launch the Sustainability Task Force. Wednesday, we shared with you about the work that has been done to give the task force its scope and directive. The final step in the process was to get feedback from our member company leaders to make sure we are on the right track.

I ask for the attention of all the CEO’s and other key executives: in September, IAPD CEO Susan Avery sent a communication to you about the Sustainability Task Force, asking you to help the Board give guidance to the task force on what their priorities should be. Please take 15 minutes and give us your input to help us guide the task force on what is most important to the industry and how IAPD can help the industry achieve its sustainability vision.

Richards: To accomplish all of these things, we need your help. We need the expertise within your companies. We need skills from all different functional areas — marketers, human resources, talent acquisition, sustainability, recycling experts, supply chain specialists, sales, training, technical product experts, engineers and executive leadership.

We need them for every committee, task force and the board.

We have a lot to accomplish in 2025, and we can’t do any of it without your help.

The IAPD volunteer workforce, along with the nine-member staff, accomplish amazing things. We should be proud of everything we’ve done so far, and excited for our future. If you’re already involved in shaping that future, thank you. If you’re not yet, and wondering how to get involved, please talk to any one of us on the board or staff.

DelGado: 2025 is definitely going to be a busy and exciting year at IAPD.

A big thank you to all our sponsors — your support adds tremendous value to this event, our most important of the year. We extend our heartfelt thanks to all our volunteers and IAPD staff for your tireless dedication to achieving our shared goals.

And of course, thank you to all of you for your continued support in advancing the performance plastics industry!