In the year prior to North America’s largest plastics event, NPE2009 agreed to a series of collaborations that would eventually expand the triennial event into eight collocated events. The first announcement came Feb. 6, when the show organizer, the Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI; Washington, DC) said it would pair the largest technical conference in North America, arguably globally, with NPE2009 (June 22-26, 2009; McCormick Place, Chicago), adding the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE; Brookfield, CT) annual ANTEC conference. The two associations had already worked together on the technical conference at NPE 2006 and had planned to do so again in 2009, but the decision to move SPE’s annual ANTEC event to Chicago was a new one.

Soon thereafter, and some 16 months before the show would take place, 864 companies gathered in Chicago in mid-February to select space for NPE2009, gathering at the newly opened West Hall of McCormick Place instead of the traditional locale of the Chicago Hilton. By the time the event was finished, 775,400 sq ft (72,037 sq m) of show floor, or 81.7% of the total occupied at NPE 2006, had been contracted out, leaving NPE2009 organizer the Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI; Washington DC) approximately 1000 exhibitors and 200,000 sq ft shy of the total for 2006. SPI said the level of advance booking boded well for NPE2009 to eclipse the 2006 vintage.

NPE2009 continued to aggregate events, with MoldMaking Expo 2009 agreeing to collocate with the show in April, joining ANTEC in the new McCormick West (Chicago) hall. Organized by Gardner Publications Inc. (Cincinnati, OH), the next MoldMaking Expo will be the tenth iteration, with the show typically drawing 130 exhibitors and 2500 attendees to exhibits and two days of technical presentations, panel discussions, workshops, and keynote speakers. In June, SPI’s Alliance of Plastics Processors (APP) announced it would shift its annual parts competition to the global NPE2009 venue, creating the inaugural International Plastics Design Competition (IPDC). SPI said the competition would be the first that’s open to products in any end-use market, from automotive to packaging, and to entrants from any country in the world. In June, SPI also announced that the Education Committee for NPE2009 would accept abstracts for presentations in a new educational program, called The Business of Plastics. The program will address topics like marketing, human capital management, finance, environmental issues, regulation, global economic trends, and other matters of strategic importance to plastics business management.

In October, SPI announced that DuPont would sponsor the Emerging Technologies Pavilion—a section of the show featuring companies, government agencies, and research groups from four sectors: sustainability, bioplastics, nanotechnology, and energy—the last to include conservation and alternate sources. By December, SPI announced that it had added four additional events covering PET packaging, rapid product design/development, the Latin American plastics industry, and coatings for plastics. SPI reached agreements with Packaging Strategies to add a PET Strategies Plus conference; Gardner Publications for a Time Compression conference and exposition; B2B Portales Inc.’s Tecnología del Plástico and Conversión magazines for a Spanish-language Latin American Plastics conference; and the Federation of Societies for Coatings Technology for a Coatings for Plastics conference. Individuals registering at npe.org can choose between a number of multi-event package plans and discounts, with the basic $80 advance registration fee covering NPE2009 and the MoldMaking Expo. In 2006, the NPE drew 1838 exhibitors covering 942,524 sq ft of show floor, with 64,438 registered attendees.