Amsterdam-based Tradefox is hosting its 2021 Virtual Recycling Conference Feb. 23-25, featuring several speakers from the metals recycling and trading sector.
Chris Yerbey, CEO of Tradefox, says his company was founded “to connect people at a distance without the need for traveling, unless you want to.” He adds, “We want to connect people so they can do business from their desktops, and COVID-19 pushed that into the forefront.”
Yerbey says Tradefox has built a community of recyclers and traders from some 120 nations. “The majority of our customers are in the metal scrap business, but we have a lot of plastics traders and a few e-scrap and paper recyclers. Our largest value is connecting the people who are farthest away from each other.”
The 2021 online conference is the second for Tradefox, and Yerbey says the traders who use the online platform reacted positively to the debut virtual event in 2020. He says global scrap trading has always been “heavily dependent on conferences. It’s the main way new business relationships are formed in global trade.”
After COVID-19 made travel difficult, Yerbey says Tradefox, which has been “building a product to build trusted relationships via technology,” asked itself how it could expand to “let people meet new people.”
One of the answers to that question has been the Virtual Recycling Conference. The company held its initial online event Sept. 29-30, 2020, and Yerbey says the February event will feature some similarities to that one while building upon what Tradefox learned from it.
The Feb. 23-25 event not only will take place during those three days but will also offer access to the content and opportunities for registered participants to interact for 27 days, says Yerbey.
“A physical conference has a time limit, and you need to meet as many people as you can in that period of time,” he comments. For the Tradefox conference, Yerbey says, “We want the conference to live on after the conference is over.”
Programming at the Virtual Recycling Conference will include a presentation from Yerbey on Tradefox’s technology, plus presentations from Zain Ahmmed, the CEO of Lahore, Pakistan-based Ferrous Metal Recyclers; Sean Davidson, CEO of metals information services provider Davis Index; Vaibhav Gupta, a director at Jaipur, India-based Shilpa Alloys; and Humayun Sheikh, the CEO of United Kingdom-based Mettalex. Thomas Jam Pedersen, the co-founder of Copenhagen Atomics also will deliver comments on the “human footprint of commodity recycling in the future.”
The Tradefox Virtual Recycling Conference also will feature several roundtable discussions.