A key component of the modern world economy, the chemical industry delivers products and innovations to enhance everyday life. It is also an industry in transformation where chemical executives and workers are delivering growth and industry changing advancements while responding to pressures from investors, regulators, and public opinion. Discover how leading companies are approaching these challenges here on the chemical show.
Join Victoria Meyer, president of Progressio Global and host of the chemical show. As she speaks with executives across the industry and learns how they are leading their companies to grow, transform, and push industry boundaries on all frontiers. Here's your host, Victoria Meyer.
Hi, this is Victoria Meyer. Welcome back to The Chemical Show, where Chemicals Means Business. This is the second in a two part series highlighting the Sustainability Leadership Award winners recognized by American Chemistry Council in 2024. Last week in an episode entitled Driving innovation in Recycling, I spoke with Matt Adams from EFC Gases and Robert Dishman from Cyclyx. If you haven't listened yet, check it out.
Those award winners, although servicing different customers and different markets and offering very different solutions had a commonality around recycling and recycling that improves value, opportunity, and supply chain. This week, I speak to three different award winners that have a common theme of collaboration, customers, and community.
These leaders include Kevin Norfleet from Celanese, which won the Circularity Award, Garry Grant from PPG, which won the Climate Award, and Mary Reinthal from DuPont, which won the Social Responsibility and Community Engagement Award. Great stories from each one of these leaders. Now, before we get onto the rest of it, if you are new to The Chemical Show or already a loyal follower, thank you.
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Now I'm moving on to today's episode where I'm talking to the three leaders about their sustainability projects and the awards that they've received. First up. Here's Kevin Norfleet from Celanese. I'm speaking with Kevin Norfleet, who is the Global Sustainability Director at Celanese, where he leads global sustainability efforts on behalf of the Acetyl business and focuses on driving sustainable products and solutions to their customers.
As part of this, Kevin recently led the launch of their Carbon Capture and Utilization Project, which was implemented in Texas, and one of the biggest CO2 emissions reductions projects that we've seen. For that project, Celanese has received the Circularity Award from ACC. Kevin, let's talk about that and welcome back to The Chemical Show.
Thank you. Great. Great to be here and appreciate the opportunity to chat more about our CCU project. It's been a really exciting project. I know we had a previous conversation, maybe a few months ago, but, yeah, very excited about what that, that carbon capture and utilization project has meant for our business. And we're very excited and delighted to receive the ACC's award for circularity. That was a great honor that we're very appreciative of.
Yeah, absolutely, and I was actually on the judging panel for one of the awards, a different award, and it's really impressive. The wide variety of, projects and programs and initiatives that are going on across the industry, to focus in on sustainability and in your case, circularity. so kudos to you guys for receiving this award. and I'm sure when you started this, it wasn't really to win an award. That was not your objective. So what's really the why behind your CCU project?
really, this came from looking across our business, our products and what are the ways where we can do something to make an impact in a way that also makes sense for our business. And I think that ultimately, this CCU project was a great example that, we do this project with. Our joint venture partner, Mitsui and Company, and they were also a great, very supportive partner to this process.
But, we really were able to look at this as something that, it was a very impactful project that we were able to put together a case that made sense, has a lot of potential. Benefits to our organization because we use methanol and, this project is about making methanol from CO2 emissions. We use methanol to make an incredible array of end products.
And so for us, really, the why is about being able to drive this option and this opportunity into a whole bunch of different products and markets and market segments that we support that we're really able to offer what we think is a very attractive, sustainable product offering for our customers.
Yeah, that's great. And, I guess, how has the customer and the market response been when you think about bringing these CCU backed products to market?
Yeah, I think it's, there's been a lot of interest, a lot of enthusiasm. I've had, many, discussions with an incredible array of customers. and so I think, it's definitely something that customers appreciate, being able to bring forward options and being able to bring forward solutions that, help reduce the carbon footprint of their products, as well as offering potentially a nice story to go with it. that said, one of the challenges that we see with, CCU is that it doesn't fit cleanly into.
Some of the categories that people commonly think about when they think about sustainability. a lot of people talk about recycling or they talk about bio based feedstocks. And what we see is that CCU can, is a little bit of a third choice that doesn't really fit perfectly into those categories. And so it does take a little bit more effort to get people to understand, what does this mean? How do I think about this? How do I use this?
But I think as we, go through the data and we go through the information we have about what this means for those products and what this means for. those products carbon footprint. there tends to be a lot of interest and enthusiasm for, the option.
that's great. And in fact, that, it's a great lead into my next question. You received the Circularity Award from the ACC and In current dialogue, most of what we think about in terms of circularity has been in the context of plastic circularity. in this case, I guess we're talking about CO2 circularity. Can you just talk about that? How do you fit into this circular space?
Yeah, absolutely. to your point, you're right. For plastics, recycling, there's a lot of great opportunities, but frankly, when you, there's a whole bunch of other materials and chemistries and products that doesn't necessarily really work as simply for. And we definitely see this as a great opportunity for a lot of those other areas.
that maybe don't have, the ability to have, a straightforward kind of recycling story, but to be able to bring an option instead, ultimately what we see is the opportunity for, from CCU is being able to create a market in demand for CO2 emissions. And, hopefully if we're successful at continuing to develop CCU as a market, we can put ourselves in position to be able to continue to use. More and more CO2 emissions. And I think that's, a really interesting circularity story.
we definitely want, and think that, companies should continue to try to do what they can to reduce their emissions, but to the extent that some level of CO2 emissions will probably always be present. We think CCU is a great ability to be able to create a circularity story and get another loop out of that CO2 before it goes to the atmosphere.
Yeah, that's right. And certainly, a big part of what we're trying to do across the industry when we think about sustainability goals is reduce, CO2 emissions, greenhouse gas. So being able to contain them and turn them into something. functional and useful is really critical. When you think about environmental footprint, which is, I think, a measure that many companies are taking, how do you think about environmental footprint when, it comes to CCU? Yeah.
we really have it, Focused in terms of how we think about it at a, product level. And again, the idea of our, the CCU project is really being able to drive, reduce footprint products for our customers. One of the interesting things about this project is most of the CO2 greater than 80 percent of the CO2 we are using actually comes from third party sources.
And so what that means is this isn't really a clean, reducing our own scope one emission because so much of that CO2 is actually coming over our fence line. So really what it ends up being, Is really more of a tool to help our customers reduce their scope three emissions, what that actually looks like can look very different depending on the products. We have some products that are made entirely from methanol.
Those can have a very big impact of, this technology and this product in terms of what that means for the product carbon footprint of products like that. And then we have some products where maybe it's a smaller percentage, but at the end of the day, anything where we use this CCU methanol, it's going to provide a benefit to the product carbon footprint in those products.
Yeah. And obviously then ultimately to the consumer, cause as you point out, a lot of the products that we see in use aren't recyclable and circular in a traditional way, but can be harnessed elsewhere. It's great So what's next for you guys? What's next in this journey on CCU and beyond?
a big part of where we are is we've got this great project up and running and, we're really pushing full speed ahead about being able to turn that into, customer solutions. And our goal is hopefully later this year and into next year that you start to be able to hear more examples of, this C. C. U. Material turning into, real products and customer, you know, visible kind of use case examples. a lot of exciting things we're working on.
I definitely think towards the 2nd, half of this year and into next year, we should start to have a lot of good announcements to be able to show where some of those things are happening. But that's very much where we're heading and our hope is to be able to get CCU to a place where it's very much recognized as a great tool and a great part of how do we make progress as society that sits right alongside recycling and bio based as another option.
Great that's awesome. thanks Kevin. I appreciate you sharing your insights and everything with the team
it. Thank you for having me on Victoria.
I think what Kevin shared with us was really interesting. In many ways, it's representative of the inherent circularity that exists within the chemical industry. I think if you just look at your business and your processes and how you guys operate, you'll find that in large part, there's a lot of circularity because of efficiency, because we want to save money and save costs. And then save the environment.
Throughout its history, the chemical industry has innovated to eliminate off gases, eliminate waste streams, and turn them into new, Useful, valuable products. It's a measure of efficiency. It's also inherent circularity. And we're seeing that same thing from Celanese in their CCU project, which is intentionally circular and intentionally built to remove carbon from the atmosphere, but also is really collaborative and provides a solution for themselves, for their customers.
And for their other business partners. So talking about collaboration and customers, next up is Garry Grant from PPG talking about some of the new products that they've developed to support EVs and other products and winning the Climate award from ACC. Here's Garry. In automotive manufacturing, the paint shop has historically been the most energy intensive area of the manufacturing process.
Much of this energy intensity is due to the high temperature ovens needed to cure the various paints, adhesives and sealant products that go into cars. To address this, PPG developed a line of electric coat products, Paints to you and I that are specifically designed to reduce the energy intensity in this automotive paint shop. For that PPG was awarded the climate award by the American Chemistry Council in their sustainability leadership awards.
Today I am speaking with Garry Grant, who is the strategic market manager at PPG. And we're going to be talking about this project and more Garry, welcome to The Chemical Show.
Hey Victoria, thanks for having me.
Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. So tell me, how did this EnviroPrime line of products and I guess specifically EPIC 300 come about?
what we've been seeing, obviously, is there is a much heightened focus on sustainability across all of our automotive customers. Through the onset of all this electric vehicle production that's coming, a lot of OEMs are looking about how they reduce their greenhouse gas emissions upstream and downstream through their supply chain. And one of the big Points for them is that use phase of the vehicle.
How can they reduce the greenhouse gas emissions coming from the use phase and electric vehicles gets right at that as a result of that. That's going to create some differences in how they. Manufacture how they assemble a vehicle, particularly the battery enclosures, the battery box where that's going to be is going to be think of it as a heat sink, on the vehicle that's going to require more time at temperature.
And clearly we want to partner with our customers to make sure that they don't have to make significant capital investments to expand their oven or, increase the footprint slow their lines down. so in order to do that, we've got to think about. Product solutions. And for me, particularly electric coat, one of the hot spots in that paint shop that you mentioned is that oven that cures the electric coat.
And so if we can either reduce, or at least maintain, the throughput, the time in the oven for the OEMs and not slow down their productivity, by bringing solutions like EnviroPrime Epic 300, To market that's a significant advantage for them again to avoid any capital investment and even potentially speed up their lines reduce the time and improve their productivity or reduce the oven temperatures and reduce that impact on the greenhouse gas emissions there in that part of the paint shop.
That's excellent. And in fact, I know that's one of the conversations that sometimes happens is that as we move to a greener economy, moving from, internal combustion engines to EVs, the consideration of all the elements of it and what it, how it affects the environment, how it affects energy consumption, is really critical. What's been the customer response since this was introduced?
Just about every OEM now has some type of electric vehicle program, right? And it's not just in one particular region, it's global. So with the EPIC 300 technologies and other EPIC technologies in our platform, we're seeing, that adoption rate Increase as we see the increase in the electric vehicle production. So it's been a good response so far. Obviously, the recognition here by ACC is great.
but we've, had some other recognitions, not just of epic 300, but other eco products in our portfolio that are helping. The OEMs meet their sustainability goals. whether it's greenhouse gas emissions or it's water intensity or energy intensity, anything we can do again to bring some, solutions to market that help them help us.
Yeah. So I saw that PPG was recently awarded, recognition from Toyota. Can you talk about that?
Yeah. That's again, another example, partnering with a customer who has, some particular needs for both performance and sustainability that they're trying to achieve. Toyota has always been at the forefront. Setting their, 2050 goals for, their carbon footprint and 2030, depending on the life cycle that they're looking at.
But again, launching that new product, great success to be able to measure and monitor where they were before that product, where they were after and with their, collaboration partner with them to, really show output of, what it is we achieve with that new product launch.
That's great. I think about panks and coatings when I typically thought about it in the environment. I think of VOCs and other emissions as a primary concern. Now I'm learning about energy, as a consideration. what else are, is PPG and your customers thinking about and that you guys are working on?
Yeah, it's funny you say that, too, because I've been around codings for over 20, 25 years now, and yeah, you always traditionally think about the sustainability or the environmental impact of what's in the can. And now as we start to look more at that life cycle, and with our sustainability partners in the, in PPG even, you look at that intensity of where that impact is, the materials are there for sure, but it's almost. 70 30, 70 percent is process driven energy.
You know what's going on in the paint shop versus 30 percent really what's in the can that we can impact. So you have to impact both obviously, but you can have a bigger bang for the buck, let's say on the process side. energy you mentioned, but water intensity again, depending on where customers are in the world, their ability to generate water, anything we can do from a product standpoint that can reduce the demand for water, reduce the waste that's generated in the process.
there's obviously a cost to that and an environmental impact. But now, again, as we talk about, just the way vehicles are being used or how they will be used in the future, there's only so much metal in the world. There's only so much aluminum in the world.
We're going to probably see a lot more recycled content coming in, circularity of these vehicles that, maybe they'll go through 10, 20 years of use and then they're getting melted down and turned into a vehicle that you or I don't even, can't even imagine now, but it's, we have to ensure that the coating we put on top of that substrate still meets performance expectations, but that we're also enabling that recycling to happen, so that's better for all of us.
And at the end of life considerations,
Exactly.
that's cool. Awesome. thank you. I really appreciate you joining us today, and learning more about what's going on.
absolutely. Thanks for having me again.
That was a great conversation with Garry. The insights that Garry shared as we talked about the award that they've just won is really just highlights the fact that for, a future greener, greener energy, a more sustainable economy. Chemicals are more important than ever. And in this example, EVs run at a different temperature profile. And so new paints and coatings are needed for electric vehicles.
At the same time, the fact that the paint shop and the fact that Paints are effectively baked on, that's my layman's terms to automobiles. and this realization that there are huge opportunities to reduce power usage, and then inherently CO2 production by taking it a different approach to paints and coatings and adhesives that go into automotive processes. So critical for our traditional automotives, It's even more critical as we go into a world where electric vehicles become more common.
So great stuff. Finally, I'm talking with Mary Reinthal from DuPont who shares some insights about their unique community engagement opportunities. Here's Mary. I'm here with Mary Reinthal from DuPont. Mary is a scientist, and more importantly, she is the current leader of Clear Into the Future, which is DuPont's global sustainability program that funds nonprofit organizations to work on sustainable development initiatives in the communities near where DuPont operates.
So really critical, opportunity and outreach into the communities. And in fact, DuPont received the Social Responsibility and Community Engagement Award from ACC this year. So we're going to be talking about that and more. Mary, welcome to The Chemical Show.
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
I'm really happy to have you here. So tell us a little bit about the Clear Into the Future grant program.
Yeah, so I think you really nailed it. It's employee driven. It's a global grants program and it was founded by DuPont in 2007. Grants recipients are non government organizations, so these are non profits or academic institutes that are going to be aligned with the Clear into the Future program purpose, which is really Driving positive impact by protecting the environment and empowering communities to thrive.
Yeah, that's really great. can you create this an example or two of some of the programs that you guys have helped to fund?
Yeah, I'd love to. So in 2023, we were really fortunate to be able to fund 19 distinct projects across seven different countries. So this is a really exciting achievement for us. And when I think of Clear into the Future funded projects, two in particular come to mind. So one is a land restoration project that took place out of Midland, Michigan. So DuPont has a site in Midland, Michigan. And this was with the NGO, Chippewa Nature Center.
And so what they were looking to do was to remove invasive exotic species and replace them with a just diverse array of native planting. So these would be shrubs. These would be wild flowers. These would be trees. And what we really liked about this project was not just. How it impacted Midland, Michigan, but it really impacted the biodiversity at large of the Great Lakes Bay region. So these are ecosystems that have seen a decline in species, year over year.
so these ecosystems are wetland ecosystems and field ecosystems. So it felt really good to give back to this project in particular, because of the larger implications.
Yeah, that's really cool. I'm going to just jump in here. I spent a lot of time in Wisconsin on a lake up there and frankly, everywhere there's lakes and waters and wetland, we're certainly seeing impact of these invasive species that are non native, that have a really significant impact on the local ecosystem, not just from a plant life perspective, but from a birds and fish and other animals.
And I think that's really cool because obviously it is a topic that hits a lot of different communities.
yes. And the Chippewa Nature Center has written, Clear to the Future grants several years in a row that have been successfully funded, so they are undertaking large scale projects that, are able to deliver on, all of the metrics that they're hoping to year over year. So we keep funding them and it's a fantastic, cause.
Sounds like a great partnership. And so you were going to tell us about a second one as well.
Yeah, definitely. So another project that comes to mind is going to be a little bit different. It took place in Seoul, South Korea, and it was to promote urban forests. So the NGO there was called Forest for Life. And what we really liked about this program was the strong education component. It also relied very heavily on community volunteerism and support in planting over 700 trees in Seoul, South Korea.
And so the strong education, the strong volunteerism and introducing new biodiversity into an urban area, those were all wins for us.
Yeah, that's really great. and you said that this is something that's employee driven. So how do employees get engaged with this?
Yeah, so employees have multiple opportunities to become engaged with clear into the future. I became engaged as a co lead and as a lead for clear into the future. So really driving the ship, employees can also become engaged as grant review committee members. So the decision to fund a project is done with a panel of employees from across DuPont.
And so folks, if they're interested in doing work with clear into the future, can opt to be on the grant review committee and that time commitment looks like reading over grants that we've received and deliberating on them to determine who should receive funding for the year and then in another way, employees can also become involved with clear into the future by becoming an employee sponsor for one of these projects.
The way these projects can move forward is if there is a DuPont employee that pushes it to the forefront and really drives it, drives the DuPont volunteerism, can vouch for the organization, and so DuPont employees can become involved in volunteer events or as one of these employees that can drive the movement forward.
Yeah, that's great. And it sounds like it really helps to spark, a partnership within the community of these organizations.
great. we really appreciate helping out these local DuPont communities. So these DuPont communities are, communities where DuPont employees live and work. And so we really, appreciate helping out employees in those communities, NGOs in those communities, and especially employees that have great connections with NGOs in these
Yeah. And as a global company, figuring out how to create that community and local connection is so critical. And as to your point, like the NGOs locally really know what the locals need. So it's hard sometimes as a global, organization, you sometimes think, okay, we know what, opportunities they are. And the reality is it's those local boots on the ground that really are able to provide that impetus.
That's exactly right.
So what's next for the program? What should we be looking forward to the rest of 2024 and as we go into 25?
Yeah. What I like to look at is the past as an analog for the future. So between 2022 and 2023, we really did see growth in all of our metrics. We saw more applications being funded. We saw more people Putting in applications.
We saw more countries being represented more regions being represented by clearing to the future funding And so really moving on We're hoping to just increase scope, you know Add more regions that are represented add more countries affiliated with, DuPont communities and just continue, growing our global footprint.
Awesome. Oh, great. Mary, thank you for joining us today. And thanks for sharing those insights.
Yeah. Thank you so much. This was a pleasure.
Three awards, three distinct companies tied together by a theme of collaboration, customers, and community. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague and make sure you're following The Chemical Show on your favorite podcast player on LinkedIn. We share a lot of great content on LinkedIn and also head over to the chemical show. com to get more insights, to sign up for our email list and just be part of it.
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