CPIA leader of the year
MARK DANIELS Ambassador of RECYCLING By Mark Stephen, editor
Photo Credit: Ryan Ketterman, Ketterman Photography
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iven such monumental screw-ups as the City of Toronto’s infamous flirtation with a plastic bag ban last year, we Canadians could be forgiven for thinking of these bans as our own unique problem, like snowstorms in May. Far from it. America has bag bans, too — Chicago just enacted one, as you may have heard. Fortunately, as in Canada, the U.S. plastics sector has no shortage of dedicated members battling tooth and nail to roll back anti-plastics legislation. They win some, they lose some, but they keep fighting. Mark Daniels is one of these bag boosters, and he’s just been named Leader of the Year by the Canadian Plastics Industry Association. By day, Daniels is the senior vice president of sustainability and environmental policy for Hartsville, S.C.-based plastic bag maker Hilex Poly. After hours, though, you’ll find him on the front lines of the long, drawn-out war being waged against much of the plastics sector by environmental activists, legislators, and about nine-tenths of the global media. And he’s no new recruit — more like a battle-scarred veteran of the type that John Wayne might have played in his heyday, albeit armed with facts and figures instead of a gun and an eye patch. Daniels serves as the chairman for the American Progressive Bag Alliance — a division of the Society of the Plastics Industry — and sits on the Board of Directors for the Western Plastics Association, the Florida Retail Federation, and the Texas Retail Association. Stanley Bikulege, Hilex Poly’s chairman and CEO, summed up Daniels’s dedication in a nutshell. “Mark works relentlessly at defending the plastic industry while ensuring that factual information is given to the public and government bodies that will allow them to make informed decisions,” Bikulege said. “He spends his time working to educate all of those groups — NGOs, government bodies, and the public — that, if left to their own devices, would eliminate key jobs in the plastics industry while negatively impacting the environment and costing consumers money. He is a true ambassador of recycling.”
BITTEN BY THE PLASTICS BUG A Cedar Grove, N.J. native, Daniels attended Villanova University near Philadelphia before starting his career with what was then Signode — it’s now Illinois Tool Works Inc. — a maker of engineered fasteners and components. His involvement in plastic bag making began in 1989, with a move to Key Packaging Industries in Salem, N.H., and then to Hilex Poly — known at the time as Vanguard Plastics — in 1999. He was bitten by the plastics proselytizing bug almost immediately. “At the time I joined Key Packaging, I also became aware of an association
Canadian Plastics June 2014 www.canplastics.com
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