Whether you’re new to the chemical industry or have been part of it for years, we will provide you with everything you need to become a master in the art of turning a nasty-looking product portfolio full of toxic chemicals into a wet dream for your company’s Sustainability Manager.
With these six easy steps, you’re guaranteed to succeed and will have your company looking sustainable faster than you can say “strategic alignment”!
Step 1: Set up a tight Product Stewardship System
Let’s say all of your company’s products contain harmful chemicals, which is not great from a sustainability perspective. Even you can see that. But the board and senior management are not too concerned. They are laser-focused on delivering short-term returns and do not want to spend a bunch of money developing safer alternatives.
Since you obviously cannot communicate any of this externally, you need to spin it another way. Your job is to work out a “Product Stewardship System” that makes it sound like we are A) not that exposed to hazardous chemicals in the first place, and B) working hard to phase out whatever bad chemicals your company’s toxic product portfolio might contain. Do not forget to give it a cool name like Green Accelerator, Sustainable Progress Force, Green Transformation Portfolio.
Now, with that in place, let’s move on to step two.
Step 2: Stay on a need-to-know basis
US and EU legislation forces you to disclose, above a certain threshold, the harmful substances you place on those markets. However, Asia does not. This means that your company doesn’t need to tell anyone about the vast amount of toxic chemicals that you produce in Asia. You only need to mention the ones you produce in Europe and the United States. But you don’t need to tell anyone about the volumes of hazardous chemicals that you produce or the number of products in your portfolio that contain them.
If someone asks too many questions on the subject, tell them your company complies with all relevant regional and national chemical regulations — because you do!
Oh, almost forgot! One of the first things you should do — if you haven’t already — is to claim confidentiality for the harmful chemicals you have on the EU and US market. It’s actually easier than you might think to hide some of your toxic portfolio and still comply with regulations.
Step 3: CSRD reporting = non-material
“What about CSRD reporting, won’t that force my company to disclose these things?”, you ask. No worries. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) is still pretty arbitrary.
All you need to do is work out an explanation for why the toxic chemicals in your portfolio are not “material” (in other words, relevant) to your company. Believe it or not, as a chemical company, you actually can argue that chemicals are non-material to your business. What a crazy but beautiful world we live in! Let’s move on to step four.
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Step 4: Set up a fancy recycling scheme
Since everyone knows recycling is good, you should come up with a neat-looking recycling scheme that includes chemical recycling or another trendy method. This doesn’t mean that you actually will recycle your chemicals — it just means that it sounds like you do. In case you’re wondering, the fact that chemical recycling is highly energy-intensive, competes with mechanical recycling and cannot be used at scale does not have to be mentioned. At any point.
Always have one or two minimal research projects on chemical recycling and reuse ongoing. That way, you can constantly refer to these, irrespective of the amounts or outcomes. And since you don’t have to be clear on the point that you are actually not going to recycle anything, the easiest way is to buy mass-balanced certificates from someone else.
You can also put out super ambitious recycling targets, claiming, for example, that by 2034 you will recycle 135% of all the products that leave your facilities. Seems unrealistic? Don’t worry, no one will follow up on those claims anyway.
Presto change-o! Your company can now safely claim that it is closing the material loop, turning waste into pristine materials. Easy like Sunday morning.
Step 5: Show care for bio-based materials
Like recycling, “bio-based” is a popular buzzword and concept you should show you care about. Since the supply of sustainably sourced bio-materials is limited at this point in time, you should be extremely vague about what you actually do in this regard.
Communicate that you use bio-based materials in accordance with a standard. That’s your best option. There are plenty of standards to choose from that don’t give a heck about where the materials come from — as long as they’re not from a fossil source.
Just as with recycled materials, keep a couple of ongoing research projects that sound state-of-the-art. Any outputs or deliveries from these projects are, of course, optional.
Step 6: Communication is key!
Last but not least, what really gives the steps in this guide their power is your communication around them. Good greenwashing requires persistent communication. The more you tell people about your sustainability efforts, the truer they become!
Post videos on social media. Send out press releases. Attend conferences and talk about your commitments. Write it all up in a well-crafted sustainability report and exude confidence when speaking to stakeholders. Don’t be afraid to fool yourself into thinking that your sustainability work really is contributing to a less polluted planet. The more times you can get words like “sustainable”, “SDGs”, “bio-based”, “recycling”, “circular economy” and “responsible” into the report — the better. Who would suspect a company mentioning “sustainability” 200+ times to have very hazardous chemicals in all its products? No one!
Don’t forget to use a lot of pictures of smiling young people against green landscapes in your communication. A picture says more than a thousand words, you know.
Bonus step!
If you have the resources, make sure to donate significant sums of money to lobby organisations and interest groups that work tirelessly to ensure progressive legislation is not passed — anywhere. Even though the steps in this guide are well-tested, the most efficient approach is still to influence regulations. This way, you won’t even need to go through the steps in this guide to greenwash your toxic portfolio.
