Chemicals for the 21st Century

© Catlayxx

In the current climate, most senior executives don’t wake up thinking that they must urgently turn their business model around and suddenly become “green”. In fact, the word green has become a bit of a cliché and one could argue that any significant change has been in rhetoric rather than substance. Some companies have even publicly rescinded their stated environmental goals or kept quiet about the benefits to appeal to growing populism and cynicism relating to environmental sustainability. 

Defossilization of industry has happened in fits and starts, but it has met serious headwinds in recent years, for a variety of reasons. Perhaps most fundamentally, companies cannot choose environmental sustainability at the expense of business sustainability. Moreover, many green companies have promised to fill the gap - offering defossilized alternatives to traditional petrochemical products – but have failed to produce economically viable solutions or even survive past scale-up stage. This has only exacerbated the skepticism around the viability of pursuing environmental sustainability as a pillar of long-term business sustainability. 

In addition, thirty years of overreliance on shipping goods from continent to continent, with total disregard to the carbon consequences, as well as the recent imposition of trade barriers, create even more complexity. The traditionalist consumers among us want the same products tomorrow as we are used to today, or until we develop a superior product solution. And the traditional basic chemicals industries have made their fortunes shipping commodity chemicals in bulk quantities from a low-cost base to multiple far-flung markets, without considering the environmental consequences and costs. 

Yet, despite the many challenges, the journey of the renewables industries shows us that the decoupling of environmental and business sustainability isn’t an inevitability.