Our ability to comply with regulations is going to become increasingly important as we move forward. For instance, we have a European-based manufacturing site for which Reach is going to have implications. We also export seating products to Europe from the United States, and the European regulations require that we track the chemicals in those products. Right now our challenge is one of integration. We have certain data in one environmental database and bill of materials data in another, and we’ve got our ERP system. They’re almost able to be integrated, but not quite. I don’t think we imagined these things would necessarily have to be integrated together, but it’s important that they are. If we pull this information together it will make our efforts more effective.

David Kepler

To me, sustainability is about the world and our contribution to some of its challenges. Ten years ago we set environmental and safety goals around things like injury and illness, process safety and chemical emissions. We have made significant progress: One of our goals was to reduce our energy consumption by 20 percent, and we reduced it by 22 percent. We also achieved an 84 percent reduction in emissions.

We expanded beyond those initial goals recently with Dow’s 2015 Sustainability Goals. We intend to improve our environmental health and safety performance by 75 percent within the next eight years. IT touches on almost every one of our goals. For example, IT is charged with creating databases to track environmental activity—measuring our emissions, tracking the safety and performance of our carriers, and managing our contractors. IT not only manages the information but it serves as a watchdog.

Dow’s current process control automation at its plants is so stringent that these systems will shut a plant down if it is not compliant with air and water emissions requirements. This technology allows facilities to operate compliantly at all times. Dow also uses a real-time monitoring system to measure the air and water emissions at its plants, and we are implementing an environmental reporting system that manages reporting of emissions data to state and federal authorities. Some of Dow’s locations in North America employ this reporting system now, and the North American rollout of this system will be finalized by the end of 2007. It will be implemented globally over the next several years.

IT also helps provide safety assessments for all of Dow’s products. We are taking the Reach concept a step further. Dow’s Sustainable Chemistry goal is about creating products in more sustainable ways—which includes increased energy efficiency, increased efficiency of material use, decreased use of scarce resources, decreased emission of man-made substances to nature, and improved social, health and security risk profiles.