Dow Launches 2025 Sustainability Goals

I received this email from the Dow Chemical Company about its new 2025 Sustainability Goals which reportedly is “designed to develop breakthrough product innovations, positively impact the lives of 1 billion people, and deliver $1 billion in cost savings or new cash flow for the Company by valuing nature in business decisions.”

Dow’s seven 2025 Sustainability Goals are as follows:

Goal 1: Leading the Blueprint – Dow leads in developing a societal blueprint that integrates public policy solutions, science and technology and value chain innovation to facilitate the transition to a sustainable planet and society. To develop the blueprint, Dow will engage in 100 significant dialogues across the public and private sector and establish 10 new collaborations. The initial blueprint will be published year-end 2017 and will be updated throughout the goal time frame, considering world progress towards sustainability and emerging challenges.

Goal 2: Delivering Breakthrough Innovations – Dow delivers breakthrough sustainable chemistry innovations that advance the well-being of humanity. By 2025, Dow’s product portfolio will have a six-fold net positive impact on sustainable development. Dow products will offset three times more carbon dioxide than they emit throughout their life cycle and save three times more energy than they use throughout their life cycle.

Goal 3: Advancing a Circular Economy – By 2025, Dow will work with other industry leaders, non-profit organizations and governments to deliver six major projects that facilitate the world’s transition to a circular economy, where waste is designed into new products and services.

Goal 4: Valuing Nature – Dow applies a business decision process that values nature, which will deliver business value and natural capital value through projects that are good for the Company and good for ecosystems. Dow will generate $1 billion by 2025 in the form of cost savings or new cash flow as measured by net present value, a measure of future cash flows discounted to the present day.

Goal 5: Increasing Confidence in Chemical Technology – Dow increases confidence in the safe use of chemical technology through transparency, dialogue, unprecedented collaboration, research and the Company’s actions. By 2025, Dow will work with non-profit, businesses and government partners to develop new, cutting-edge predictive modeling capabilities and integrate them into 100% of their new product assessments. They will also improve on the understanding of chemistry’s potential and will develop and implement new predictive modeling capabilities.

Goal 6: Engaging Employees for Impact – Dow people worldwide directly apply their passion and expertise to advance the well-being of people and the planet. By 2025, Dow employees worldwide will apply their talents to positively impact the lives of 1 billion people. Dow employees will give 600,000 hours to support students and teachers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education. Dow volunteers will complete 700 sustainability projects around the world.

Goal 7: World-Leading Operations Performance – Dow maintains world-leading operations performance in natural resource efficiency, environment, health and safety. By 2025, Dow will reduce its freshwater intake intensity at key water stressed sites and its waste intensity footprint by 20 percent. It will also obtain 400 megawatts of its power demand from renewable sources and strive to eliminate unplanned safety events.

Highlighting sustainable chemistry, Dow Chemical previously stated in its 2015 Sustainability Goals that it will increase the percentage of sales to 10% for products that are highly advantaged by sustainable chemistry.

Leading up to the end of 2015, Dow said it will publicly report on progress by:
– Reporting overall annual assessment of its sustainable chemistry index, and performance against % of sales having sustainable chemistry advantages.
– Presenting and/or publishing life cycle assessments that are validated independently by an external stakeholder, on existing or planned Dow products.
– Providing ongoing updates on promising areas of research and investments and collaborations that spur sustainable chemistry innovation.
– Promoting sustainable chemistry internationally through student prizes and Dow employee awards under The Dow Sustainability Innovation Challenge Award program.

Dow’s Sustainable Chemistry Index includes several factors to determine products that have sustainable chemistry advantages:
Q1: Renewable/Recycled Content
Q2: Resource Management
Q3: Life Cycle Benefit
Q4: Manufacturing Efficiency
Q5: Social Need
Q6: Manufacturing/Transportation
Q7: Product Application
Q8: Public Policy/End Of Life

I actually had an interview with Dow Chemical about their Energy Bag program when I attended the NPE Plastics Tradeshow. Hopefully I’ll be able to post  this interview as soon as possible next month.

Here is a video summarizing all of these new 2025 Sustainability goals. I am actually impressed with the marketing/graphic designer/advertising aspects of this new initiatives.