Christmas wishes
Firstly, my sincere thanks to Carmo Wood in Portugal, for hosting our Autumn Congress and as you know I was appointed in Braga as your President. My sincere thanks also to Andreas Heidel for his four years in office and I look forward to his support as Past-President. Andreas worked very hard to create a structure at WEI to help us promote the benefits of treated wood across Europe that has helped our Institute to grow.
Since my appointment, I have followed the actions of our four work groups, namely, Sustainability, Marketing & Communications, Regulatory Affairs and WEI Quality Scheme, and also met with some of the conveners. Our work groups have been very busy this year I would particularly like to thank the sustainability group under Patrizia’s leadership for their input to the new CEI-Bois publication and our joint publication with EWPM on the sustainability of biocides and treated articles. Regulatory Affairs group has followed the IED Bref and BPR mainly and kept our members informed.
Two weeks ago Frederik and I took part in the General Assebly of CEIBois which was held in Tallinn by invitation from the Estonian Wood Association. About 30 delegates were informed of the activities of CEIBois, such as their two newly presented booklets; Wood – Building the Bioeconomy, and EU Forest-Based Industries 2050 A vision of sustainable choices for a climate-friendly future. They also presented the Strategic research and innovation agenda 2030 for the Forest.Based Sector. All of this is of course very interesting from an overall wood construction perspective.
A meeting of the Marketing & Communications group is scheduled for January in Stockholm. We hope to further develop our website this year and draft more publications to support our lobbying activity within the European Parliament.
On that note, I would like to stress my ambition to increase the lobbying activities towards the European Parliament. We had hoped that an event could be arranged around our Spring meeting however, Parliament is not sitting that week. We will continue with these plans and would very appreciate any input from our Members.
I wish you and your families a peaceful and enjoyable Christmas and a prosperous and Happy New Year.
Mr Mikael Westin – WEI President
Ingarp Träskydd AB
Dates for the diary!
- January 2020 – Marketing WG Meeting in Stockholm
- March 11 to 12 2020 – Spring Congress – Brussels
- September 10 to 12 September 2020 – Autumn Congress Milan, Italy.
