Dow Commitments to Promote Sustainable Development

By Lily Wang  Mr. Scott D. Noesen, Global Director of Sustainable Development for the Dow Chemical Company (Dow), visited China at the end of March 2006 to attend the World Business Council for Sustainable Development meeting held in Beijing. It was a pleasure to interview Mr. Scott Noesen, who is in his 30th year with Dow and is responsible for directing and integrating Sustainable Development activities into the core business and operations of Dow.

Question: From a chemical sector point of view, how should we look at sustainable development?

Scott Noesen: When we look at sustainable development, we often look at what we call the Triple Bottom Line, which is economic prosperity, environmental stewardship, and corporate social responsibility. It is more than just environmental performance. Corporate social responsibility involves developing products that meet social needs, developing our communities and developing our people.     The classic external definition of sustainable development comes from the Brundtland commission years ago: "development that meets the needs of today's generation without compromising future generations to meet their needs." For Dow, in short, sustainability is really about our relationship with the world through our products, through our people, and through the communities in which we live. This is how we will ultimately define it and measure ourselves against sustainable development.

Question: Is there any globally accepted international evaluation standard to evaluate whether a company, a business or a country has reached sustainable development? How should companies balance the relationship between making profit and sustainable development?

Scott Noesen: Because sustainable development is so new, there are very few explicitly-stated international accepted standards. There are measures of success. One example of this is the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), an initiative that requires companies to report on very specific elements of sustainability. Dow Chemical has a GRI report and reports, as we call it, "in accordance with GRI principles. "   Concerning the issue of profits versus sustainable development performance, we don't necessarily agree that you have to compromise. An example is our Environment, Health and Safety (EH&S) 2005 goals, which we started in 1996 and now are over in 2005. We did an assessment in 1996 and we said it's going to cost us US$1 billion but expect to get a return on investment of about US$3 billion through reduced illnesses and injuries, through reduction in energy, through improved productivity. In reality, now we are in 2006, we actually saved US$5 billion.

Question: Sustainable development has been written into China's 11th Five-year Plan for the first time. I am quite interested to know, looking into the near future, what will Dow do to contribute to sustainable development in China?

Scott Noesen: We've done a number of things in communities, including participating in helping educate students in 300 schools in China on recycling. We also support small and medium enterprises in adopting environmentally-friendly practices through our initiatives with the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) and with the State Administration for Worker Safety (SAWS). For each of those Dow has made a RMB6 million contribution over a 3-year period, with the intent of sharing Dow's experiences and best practices. The first one, with SEPA, is to promote Cleaner Production, the second one focuses on safety in dealing with chemicals. (See Page 6) In addition, we are evaluating a coals-to-chemicals facility. We think that it will be probably one of our bigger contributions because we will take coal, a resource generally abundant in China, and convert that into useful chemicals in an environmentally responsible way.   I would also like to make a few comments about the relationship between Dow and sustainable development and China's 11th Five-year Plan. Some aspects in the Five-year Plan such as the scientific concept of development, innovation, eco-efficiency and the point of harmonious society are very compatible with Dow's mission of mastering science and technology. We are just finishing up our 10-year goals on EH&S that were created in 1996, precisely dealing with goals including energy reduction, emissions reduction, waste and waste water reduction. All of those are targets in the Five-year plan. So I'm very excited about the compatibility between the 11th Five-year Plan and what we're trying to do in sustainable development.