Queensland’s Minister for Housing and Public Works Mick de Brenni this week called on the Commonwealth Government to ‘protect Australians’ and introduce an importation ban on all aluminium composite panels with a PE core.

The Federal Court of Australia has approved a $147.6 million ‘scheme of arrangement’ for the sale of paper company and wide format supplier Spicers, formerly PaperlinX, to Tokyo-based global paper giant Kokusai Pulp & Paper Co (KPP).

After agreeing to tighten pollution controls, Australian Paper has been reissued a Works Approval notice for its proposed $600 million Energy from Waste (EfW) plant to be located at its Maryvale mill in the Latrobe Valley. The project was suspended earlier this year following an appeal by local environmental groups.

Sydney developer/manufacturer Impression Technology says its new DGT Digital G4 DTG printer has ‘exceeded all expectations’ in Europe, with 28 units shipped since its official launch at FESPA Munich in May this year.

In a surprise departure from the current Australian outdoor industry norm, leading global out-of-home (OOH) advertiser JCDecaux is reducing the number of advertisers displayed on its large format digital billboards in Australia and New Zealand from ten to six. 

The Sign Guys NQ in Townsville, Perth’s Focus on Signs and the Melbourne-based Australian Plastic Card Company all announced this week via ASIC that they’ve called in liquidators and are going out of business

Australia’s only manufacturer of office paper – including its flagship Reflex brand – has partnered with the Victorian Government and Mainstream Aquaculture to conduct a $1.24 million study into the viability of constructing the world’s largest indoor aquaculture facility to farm barramundi near its Maryvale Mill in the Latrobe Valley.

Wide format manufacturer swissQprint, distributed in Australia and New Zealand by NSW-based Pozitive, has set up a new ink laboratory at its headquarters in Kriessern, Switzerland.

New research says the global print market is shrinking in volume but growing in value, with digital print, especially inkjet, an increasingly valuable part of the overall print market.

Registration has opened for this year’s Letterheads NZ - the annual 'brushfest' where signwriters from all over New Zealand are joined by members of Letterheads Australia and ‘one or two’ Americans and Europeans.

Michelle Johnson, Director of Worldwide Marketing at SAi, recommends to 'invest in,' not 'spend' time as we enter the start of a new financial year. When it comes to the bottleneck of designing signs to feed the printers, she predicts that AI (artificial intelligence) will be making a lot of the decisions in the future.

Self-titled as the "Oscars" of Global Sign Industry, SIGN CHINA 2019 - Shanghai will be held from 18th-20th September at Shanghai New International Expo Centre (SNIEC). The exhibition is expected to reach 100,000 square meters with 1,250 exhibitors, by then, new products and equipment from sign and LED industry, as well as one-stop solutions which apply to various fields.

“It’s your responsibility to ensure you comply with all these new regulations, obtain all the required permits, and choose appropriate materials – for instance, substrates that meet the rules for combustibility and flammability where that is required,” says Michael Punch of the Australian Sign & Graphics Association (ASGA)

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The FESPA Awards 2020 are now open to print service providers and sign-makers, with organisers adding four new categories including a Printeriors award to reflect growth in the printed décor market.

Canon Oceania has opened its 2019 Grants Program, with over $30,000 worth of cash and Canon equipment up for grabs across Australia and New Zealand.

Roland DG Australia launched a new customer support program called Engage - an installation and training service for customers across Australia that will manage the installation of new equipment, allowing customers to focus on their business.

Snap Franchising, the company behind around 150 Snap Print-Design-Website outlets in Australia, New Zealand, China and Ireland is looking for a new CEO following the sudden and as yet unexplained departure of Peter Sinodinos on Tuesday.

An investigation into how a five-by-four metre road sign fell and crushed a car on Melbourne’s Tullamarine freeway in January has found the sign was missing a steel plate and several safety checks had not been carried out.

Shareholders of paper company and wide format supplier Spicers, formerly PaperlinX, voted overwhelmingly in favour of a $A147 million proposal to sell the company’s entire Australia and New Zealand operations to Japan-based global paper giant Kokusai Pulp & Paper Co (KPP).

The City of Sydney filed a Federal Court application to join the City of Melbourne in legal action against Telstra over its plan to add digital advertising screens supplied by outdoor advertiser JCDecaux to its national network of 16,000 payphones.

“After a successful trip to Tokyo Sign and having a good look at all of the Japanese solvent printers on their home turf, coming back and buying the Epson S80600 was an easy decision as it stood head and shoulders over the competition,” says Darren Watkins, director of Melbourne large format & display printer Resolution Imaging.