New year, new features

Welcome to a new year, new challenges and opportunities, and also to some new features in your magazine.

As you will read within the articles in this issue, there is an awful lot of optimism in the industry right now, and that in spite of some obvious problems such as high energy costs and the related rising cost of plastics, a weak U.S. currency, a strong European common currency, and all of the rest that place high demands on a processor’s ability to react quickly to changing market conditions. A healthy dose of optimism always is helpful in contributing to a company’s success, and hopefully your outlook for 2008 is as positive as many of your contemporaries is.

Our mission at MPW remains providing plastics processors around the world the technical and market information they need to better run their businesses, coupled with relevant news and insight. Beginning in this issue, you will notice some changes we have made in our ongoing effort to better meet this mission. Near the front of each issue, our As I See It opinion articles will now be in a Q&A format in which we ask questions of processors, moldmakers, or other industry experts. Continuing through the magazine, you’ll see that we have extended our Material Thoughts section to at least three pages in every issue. MPW has long been known as the industry’s best source of news and information on material developments, and we intend to build on that tradition.

A few pages further in you’ll find, within our Product Watch section on new equipment, that each issue now includes a ’Focus’ article highlighting recent developments on a specific type of machine. With this change we hope to help you better compare ’apples to apples’ as you go about your capital equipment spend.

In addition, this year we will begin publishing our Technology Bulletins, emailed to processors who have identified themselves as interested or active in a certain technology. Successful processors almost always are interested in processes beyond the ones they perform in their shops, and our magazine will continue to meet the demand for this broad-based look at the industry. These new Technical Bulletins will ’drill down’ deeper to provide even more focused information on selected topics. Categories covered on at least a quarterly basis in separate Bulletins will include blowmolding and thermoforming, decoration/assembly and extrusion, and compounding and auxiliary equipment.

Subscribers who have identified themselves as engaged in one of these activities will automatically receive the Bulletins (with an unsubscribe option, naturally); other interested readers can request their names be added to a subscription list for specific newsletters by emailing Jamie Quanbeck, our online editor, at jquanbeck@modplas.com. Another option is to subscribe for the newsletters via our website, where starting in January the most current Tech Bulletins also will be posted.

Among the many new opportunities and challenges certain to appear in 2008, we toss out our own challenge to those processors, students, and consultants who think they know a bit about plastics processing. Just as this year’s Summer Olympics in China will highlight the world’s top athletes, our own competition in the August issue will challenge the world’s plastics processing experts. Start training!

Best wishes for a happy and profitable new year.

Matt Defosse, Editor-in-Chief

mdefosse@modplas.com