Our guest this month on the Resin Report Monthly Edition is Jeremy Pafford, Head of North America, Market Development, at business intelligence firm ICIS.

As always, we began our conversation with a recap of resin pricing trends in the previous month and a look at what might be in store in June and beyond. In terms of future trends to watch, Pafford believes that supply and demand may begin to find some balance, with price inflation hitting a ceiling and perhaps reversing. There is a big if, however — that “we [successfully] navigate through the hurricane season on the Gulf Coast,” said Pafford. Based on historical data that he has analyzed, “there's always a one in four chance in a year that this would be the time where we get a major hurricane that takes supply offline,” he noted.

We also spent a fair amount of time talking about a proposed ruling from the Securities and Exchange Commission that involves calculating companies’ carbon footprints. Part of it is fairly simple to figure out — the amount of energy you consume in manufacturing your products — but it may also involve calculating the accumulated carbon footprint of everything that happened upstream before that resin even showed up at your doorstep. If your eyes are glazing over at this point, don’t check out! This is going to be a major head-scratcher for some companies, and Pafford has been working on a project that will provide companies with visibility into the carbon footprint and even use that data to their competitive advantage. The program will be rolled out at the end of this month, but listeners to this podcast will get a preview of what it will offer. Pafford also wrote an article for PlasticsToday about this project, which you can read here: Clearing The Air: Understanding Scope 3 Emissions for Plastics.

Pafford drives ICIS’s business development strategy for the US, Mexico, and Canada and represents ICIS to chemical and polymer markets to showcase its expertise. He previously served as Managing Editor, Americas, for ICIS, leading the team analyzing chemical markets in the Americas and has authored research and presented at major events on topics such as the North American shale boom, US-China trade tensions, and how macroeconomic trends translate into chemical market trends.

I hope you find this third episode of the Resin Report Monthly Edition engaging and informative. Let us know what you think — good, bad, or indifferent — by leaving a comment.