The journey of the global bulk chemicals industry has been one of constant evolution. In its current avatar, it delivers products that are increasingly central to our modern lives.

It is a story of innovation, research and development that never ceases to surprise. After all, what does making chlorine or ammonia have to do with cellphone microprocessors, or shatter-proof windscreens, or even lightweight toothpaste tubes?

WE NURTURE NATURE

The chemical sciences and engineering are playing a critical role, while we make the advances we need in developing alternative energy strategies, in bettering medicines, and in finding innovative ways to improve our environment. We ensure that engineering and manufacturing is designed for sustainability, and effluents don’t pour into our lakes and streams, and instead help treat industrial water to make it usable again.

Let’s also consider all the things we love: Shiny laptops, state-of-the-art smartphones, fashion and cars — they all draw their elixir of life from the intensity of research and development, innovation and forward thinking of the modern chemical industry.

This same science creates the batteries that run everything, from your laptop, your electric car, to solar power plants. It makes the food on our tables healthier, heart-friendly and gluten-free. For those who need medication, it makes hard-to-swallow pills palatable, while designing delivery methods that make medicines work more efficiently.

The drivers of the modern chemical industry are escalating the demand for energy in the wake of depleting fossil resources and a heightened sense of urgency on the need for sustainable economic growth, while protecting the environment and climate.

The industry has long been cognisant of the immense challenges it faces to ensure sustainability. For instance, one of the modern chemical industry’s engines of innovation in recent years is industrial biotechnology or white biotechnology – as it is widely referred to as in continental Europe.

It is a key platform to create innovative and sustainable chemical processes and products. The industry is thus at the threshold of a hybrid between petrochemicals and biotechnology.

Change and innovation have historically been key indicators of where the industry has moved. In its effort to drive manufacturing efficiency, it is increasingly putting much greater emphasis on how this change materialises, helping make existing processes better, simplifying and reducing the process path to the product wherever possible, and ultimately delivering lower costs to consumers.

It isn’t just about R&D and innovation all the way, though. While it brings new products into the market, the global chemicals industry has established an emerging key indicator of sustainable growth – responsibility, throwing its considerable and best-in-class R&D legacy to address the many issues and concerns about safety and environmental degradation associated with it. One ongoing initiative is called Responsible Care, the industry’s own attempt to make responsibility and care an integral part of every process it employs. It has a role to play right from the clean, sustainable manufacturing of chemicals, to their protected, standardised transport to client facilities, to their safe, quick disposal.

CLIMATE CHANGE CONTEXT

India is at the centre of the global energy and climate change narrative. The government, in partnership with chemical companies, is taking cogent measures to sustain a planet-wide momentum. The chemical sector is the mainstay of a large number of industries, and it is heartening to note that the Government of India has taken a number of measures to ensure the industry’s growth is sustained in the longer term.

The draft National Chemical Policy, 2012, released by the Department of Chemicals accords high importance to R&D, technology upgradation, promotes approaches that negate growing pollution and environmental degradation, creates an efficient system for effluent disposal and focuses on green chemicals.

There have been some noteworthy initiatives undertaken in India in the past few years. Until a few years ago, chemicals were transported by regular road tankers that one sees transporting water today – definitely not the safest option available.

Leading chemical players across the world today insist upon ISO containers as the minimum standard for the movement of hazardous chemicals, and introduced ADR (Accord Européen Relatif Au Transport International Des Marchandises Dangereuses par Route)-certified tankers.

Today, the Indian chemical industry collaborates with transport service providers to introduce ISO- and ADR-certified tankers from Europe to transport hazardous chemicals to their customers in a safe, eco-friendly and sustainable way. The ISO/ADR containers are today established as the first link in a safety-oriented delivery mechanism.

WASTE MANAGEMENT

Another instance of commitment to sustainability is a sensitivity to reduce all kinds of waste, and a commitment to reuse and recycle everything and anything around us. Water, for instance, is a good example. On the one hand, the overarching scarcity of water in many Indian states is reaching epic proportions. On the other, the rapid explosion of urban populations is leading to the production of greater and greater amounts of waste water.

Some of the world’s leading scientific minds – in particular in the realm of the chemical sciences – have been fashioning a solution to address the problem of industrial waste water recovery to create reusable water. It is this ‘recycled’ water that runs through some leading industrial units in India.

I would like to believe that the promising emergence of green chemistry – where chemical products are designed to be benevolent to the environment at conception – is the result of the industry’s focus on continuous improvement, leading manufacturers to deliver products that are functionally better, more efficient and long-lasting.

The industry’s evolving inner mind will help us address many of our world’s problems. Even as you read this, the chemical industry is hard at work, looking to tap, store, and deliver alternate energy reliably, and on a large scale.

(The author is President — CEO & Chairman, Dow India.)