Naw, this can't really have happened, especially since Plastics News had printed so much advance warning and advice against it.

Is it correct that the Chemical Manufacturers Association has now reinvented itself with a name change to the American Chemistry Council? Could it be true that ACC has decided to start a major ad campaign with the uniquely creative and never-before-considered theme from outside-the-box visioning, "Chemistry Makes It Possible"?

Is this what made that happen? Did the American Plastics Council really shoot itself in the head by moving into the CMA/ ACC headquarters, and thereby now appears to be subsumed by and part of the chemical association, and thereby now appears to be part of the chemical industry?

Did APC actually donate its (what should have been uniquely used) great plastics ad motto to chemicals? And having been unsuccessful in trying to eliminate the Society of the Plastics Industry Inc., now the APC and ACC staffs are in what is said to be mortal conflict, while SPI is truly going through an invigorating restoration and real reinvention.

And, is this what we're really seeing? Is SPI picking up so much strength with lots of new members who see a great set of missions and results, that:

The resin guys and gals will no longer have nearly as much control as when they were inside the box?

They will have caused enough fragmentation to deprive themselves of the benefit of paying only one set of administrative costs for a trade association?

They have caused a breakdown of the long-established SPI discipline that prevented one part of the plastics industry from attacking other parts on environmental, health and safety-related grounds?

They have stupidly put themselves in the chemical industry subsection so as to besmirch rather than enhance the good name of plastics in the public eye?

Is it worth mentioning additionally the resin guys' and gals' silly thinking whereby they, in resigning from SPI in an NPE show year, put themselves into this show as nonmembers with their exhibition costs going up enough to cover perhaps as much as two years of SPI dues?

Naw, this can't really be happening.