Dow's environmental agenda

Environmental stewardship and corporate citizenship have long been key priorities for Dow. Today, they have a place at the very heart of the Company’s strategy, ranked among the most important drivers of Dow’s long-term success.

Through 2007, we continued to make progress (604KB PDF) toward our ambitious 2015 Sustainability Goals. Launched in 2006, these goals raise the bar significantly higher for our environmental, health and safety performance, while also addressing a broader set of challenges focused on local communities, product stewardship and the reduction of our global environmental footprint.

In this respect, the year saw a number of significant achievements by Dow, including:

• The Company continued efforts to enhance energy efficiency through a broad range of initiatives, including a process at Dow’s Terneuzen site in The Netherlands to re-use treated household wastewater. The project saves energy, conserves water and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
• Dow joined with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and China’s Energy Research Institute to develop a program aimed at supporting China’s efforts to improve energy efficiency and reduce energy intensity.
• Dow Building Solutions made further headway with its building-integrated photovoltaic program, which will enable solar energy generation cells to be incorporated directly into the design of commercial and residential building materials, such as roofing systems, exterior sidings and fascias. The project received a $20 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy as part of the Solar America Initiative Pathways Program—bolstering Dow’s efforts to design, develop and scale up production of building-integrated photovoltaic components that will significantly reduce the cost of solar energy.
• Dow Brazil and Jean-Michel Cousteau’s Ocean Futures Society launched the Ambassador of the Environment Program in Guaruja, Brazil. This extension of Dow’s U.S. partnership with Cousteau is designed to connect young people with the environment and teach them how to live more sustainably.
• We continued to successfully introduce products and technologies to the marketplace while demonstrating our commitment to sustainability. We launched Propylene Glycol Renewable, a product used in a variety of industry applications that is made from glycerin generated during the manufacture of biodiesel, a diesel-fuel alternative produced from vegetable oil. And customers responded very positively to our announced joint venture with Crystalsev to build the first world-scale sugar cane-to-polyethylene facility, based in Brazil. As well as using a renewable feedstock, the process will produce significantly less carbon dioxide than traditional polyethylene manufacturing processes.
• And we stepped up efforts to prepare next-generation leaders in the area of sustainability. The Dow Chemical Company Foundation committed $2 million to establish a new Sustainable Products and Solutions program with the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, in partnership with its College of Chemistry. In addition to its financial contribution, Dow also loaned an executive to facilitate the growth of the program. This multi-disciplinary research and learning environment will lead to new thinking in the development of products that will be sustainable, improve quality of life, and protect health and the environment.

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