OARA mid-year meeting a success

News - Recycling

Tuesday, 18 September 2012 09:19

By Mark Kimmich

Hamilton, Ontario -- September 18, 2012 -- This past weekend in Hamilton, the members of the Ontario Automotive Recyclers Association hosted their mid-year meeting. Every year for two days, the members convene to engage in networking, planning and fun. This year’s edition was no exception.

On Friday, the 120 attendees were treated by LKQ Dominion to a catered barbecue and concert. “Four years ago, LKQ Dominion became the first LKQ acquisition in Canada, so it was great that they were the hosts,” says Steve Fletcher, Executive Director of OARA. “It’s very unique in our industry that people invite each other to their shops and share information that way, so big kudos to LKQ for opening their door. They put on a great show.”

Friday also saw a golf tournament and charity car auction. While the gold tournament is primarily for fun and networking, the charity car auction has a definite purpose, even if the members have fun doing it. “We ended up having eight, good level cars donated by the insurance industry,” explains Fletcher, “and $32,000 was generated by the sale of auctioned vehicles for the OARA scholarship fund. Not only did the members, who were the only people allowed to bid, really step up, they had a blast just doing the auction.”

The real business of the meeting occurred with the members meetings on Saturday. Approximately 70 people attended of which 35 are direct members of the association. Most of these proceedings are closed to the public so that the members can have honest dialogue among themselves.

“We spent the whole day going over activities, committee reports, what are plans are for next year with a good chunk of time being spent on our legislative agenda,” says Fletcher. “The meetings were power-packed this year – we crammed in as much as we could.”

While motivations for attending differ as “some guys are there for fun and some are there for raw information,” the meetings did have some planning that will see real consequences in the coming year.

Hard work was done on the Gold Seal Business Certification Program. This program, designed to help standardize the recycling business while providing training to members.

“We really rolled up our sleeves for our members and we hope that program will be active by December,” says Fletcher.

Also, it was decided that next year’s meetings will be slightly different as the OARA plans to partner with sister organizations in Quebec and New York to give the members a look at the auto recycling business from a different perspective.

For more information, please visit oara.com.