Its a vision thing

01 June 2004 17:21  [Source: ICIS news]

Sadly lacking in the chemicals industry is a sense of, not so much purpose, but what the sector might be and represent in years to come.

 

Recent scenarios have mapped out depressing and downbeat possible futures for large parts of the traditional or mainstream sector. The just completed Cefic scenarios project is a case in point. But businesses saddled with low growth and limited prospects by no means represent all that is chemicals or materials transformation.

 

Innovation leads large parts of the industry. Some established firms are changing fast and new companies are creating opportunities for growth.

 

In the UK, the Chemistry Leadership Council (CLC) is trying to tap into and make sense of these changes and derive a vision for a sustainable future. No mean task in itself, it ties in with other CLC projects linked to innovation and skills.

 

A series of stakeholder meetings have identified the good and bad of chemicals sector sustainability. The task now is to refine and distill thinking into robust messages and a set of values that can be built on and developed.

 

Coming out of the stakeholder events is a once again depressing sense of world weariness and lack of optimism for the future. But that needs to be changed. Parts of the chemicals sector have a lot going for them. Others perhaps not. The trick in any developed economy is to pinpoint and build on the positive no matter how difficult that might at first appear to be.

 

The CLC has a difficult task on its hands but also the unique opportunity to provide true leadership across the breadth of UK chemicals. No-one is clear as to what sustainable development let alone sustainability is in an industrial sense but that does not mean that a group like the CLC cannot challenge active engagement of the industry with stakeholders up and down the product chain and across much wider fields of interest.

 

Without doubt chemicals will be vitally important to future economic and societal development. The question is very much what direction that development might take to deliver greatest benefits aligned to consumers and others in society might want.

 

Certainly from an environmental and a financial standpoint the UK chemicals sector has let others dictate the agenda for more than 20 years and it is about time that it took back the advantage.

 

Individual companies can do a great deal but certain issues demand a sectoral approach and it is here that the CLC’s opportunities lie.

 

The CLC has been challenged to develop a vision of sustainability for UK chemicals and will be discussing its ideas with senior executives across the country over the coming weeks. This is a critical stage in which buy-in from industry movers and shakers is vitally important.

 

By October, according to its own timetable, the Council needs a strong message to deliver to its own stakeholders. UK chemical companies need to help it deliver one that is as robust as it is challenging and forward-looking.

 

*See www.chemistry.org.uk

 

Nigel Davis is a member of the CLC Futures Group.

 

By: Nigel Davis
+44 20 8652 3214

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