The recent annual BCF Conference in the UK attracted a capacity audience with a packed agenda that included speakers from the industry, academia, government, the environmental lobby and even from the coatings market in Russia.
BCF CEO Moira McMillan commented: “Today’s coatings market is indeed an international one and several of our speakers very much reflected that fact, presenting us with a global view of a number of key topics including the future availability and price of energy, the opportunities and benefits of lobbying in Brussels, and the international development of nano-technologies”.
While the presentations from John Barlett, Midlands agent for the Bank of England, and John Dixon, from Whittle Industry Data, provided a somewhat less than rosy view of the recent past and the immediate future for the UK economy and the UK coatings industry, Piotr Galitzine, MD of BASF Russia, showed that there remain areas of extreme business buoyancy around the world, and that economic and political conditions can change with extreme rapidity.
One of the key speakers on the second day was Carol Boyer-Spooner, CEO of Chemistry Innovation, a publicly funded knowledge transfer network currently involved in 68 live projects directly focused on the needs of industry, worth a total of £42M.
Areas she suggested would be of particular interest to the coatings sector are a new Knowledge Centre for Materials Chemistry, and technologies and policies to stimulate the production of chemicals from renewable feedstocks.
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