Southern Society for Coatings Technology Meeting In St. Simon's Island Georgia

I attended the Southern Society Meeting, and got to meet a lot of wonderful people. It was a nice location, and although it is tween seasons, it is nice to be outside in the sun. In fact, I got sun burned yesterday afternoon.

There were a few good papers on natural coatings, and the best was by Stuart Williams from Rohm and Haas, who gave the keynote. He hit many of the same themes that I did in my talk. He said R&H and "Ceres" were working on a bioroute to methyl methacrylate, which would be a big advance if successful. There is Ceres Company that does energy crops, and Ceres consortium that promotes environmental causes -- I don't know which it is. Getting a solution for propylene based building blocks is a major issue in the field.

This afternoon, we had a nice presentation on REACH, the European chemical regulatory system, that seems to be a far more complicated version of TSCA, or more accurately the Canadian DSL. REACH has worthy goals, but it is wildly expensive.

Happily I did get a few minutes to jog on the beach this afternoon, before heading to the awards dinner Tuesday night, and the 4:30 AM departure to the airport Wednesday morning.