We will ultimately provide our stakeholders with key information related to the safety and risk of every chemical from Dow. To meet our goals relative to Reach, Dow will develop an integrated database that tracks consumption, usage and loss of a given base material that makes up bigger products to do a net balance across the entire lifecycle of a product. This database will allow Dow to better understand how materials are consumed during manufacturing. We started to gather information on 15 products this year. There’s another 50 to go next year, and by the end of 2015 we want information on all our products out there transparently. Using SAP’s environmental health and safety platform, we will make that information available on our website.

Regulations are a main driver behind these initiatives. Even though we’ve had environmental systems in place since the early 1980s and toxicology labs since the 1930s, the issues those systems are required to address change. So we come up with new environmental initiatives, and there is a lot of automation that goes into successfully executing them: Process control systems, monitoring systems, new interfaces—those are the pieces that IT has to upgrade. As we go forward, different regions and countries are going to mandate different things, and we are going to have to comply with those regulations in addition to our own environmental agenda.

However, in our progress toward our 2005 goals, we also realized great savings from better use of our resources, including energy efficiency. For example, we estimated we would spend $1 billion on technology and processes to save $3 billion. However, our actual savings were closer to $5 billion due to the rise in energy costs. Given the magnitude of the savings, our modest investment in IT solutions such as the Global Emissions Inventory or Global Incident Reduction Database would suggest a very high return on investment.

Many of our 2015 goals are related more to top-line growth than bottom-line cost reduction, so it’s tough to assess their impact at this point. But some of the new IT tools and systems, including an integrated Life Cycle Assessment database and decision tools, will go directly to our ability to achieve our growth and innovation goals.

Rosalee Hermens

Our environmental approach is pervasive throughout all aspects of our business, from making sure our products are made with materials that are environmentally friendly, to phasing out our use of PCBs in our products, to eliminating the use of solvents in the glues that we use to put shoes together.