Five on Five Interview: Sustainability According to the Industry Players

For the second instalment of the 5 on 5 Interview on Sustainability, we asked AkzoNobel, BASF, Evonik, Perstorp and PPG to tell us more about their sustainability journey towards a greener and healthier environment for everyone.

Back in January 2019, to officially kick-start the Sustainability section in our magazines, we asked five key players of the industry if they were willing to answer 15 questions on the role of sustainability, its challenges and the different approaches to the practice. The result was an inspiring, in-depth interview on some of the Best Practices of Sustainability in the surface treatment sector.

Back then we also promised we would do a series of interviews, involving other companies as well. Today we deliver on our commitment.

After a brief summer hiatus, here we present the second instalment of the 5 on 5 Interview on Sustainability, which questions have been answered once again by five different companies that play a key role within our industry and that are at the forefront of the journey towards a greener and healthier environment for everyone.

We are under no illusion: this journey is long and full of challenges, and we are running out of time. According to a 700-pages report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change - the impacts of global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius will lead to unprecedented changes: from rising sea levels to more devastating droughts to more damaging storms. Pooling together more than 6,000 scientific publications, drawing contributions from 133 authors, and having more than 1,000 scientists review the findings, the IPCC report concluded that we have less than 12 years to make massive and unprecedented changes to the global energy infrastructure to limit global warming to moderate levels.

We are glad to see that companies in our sector are not only acknowledging the issue but they are also putting words into action, by proving that being sustainable not only is possible but it can also provide for a great business value. We would like to thank AkzoNobel, BASF' Coatings Division, Evonik, Perstorp and PPG for their commitment to participate to this interview and we hope it will make for an interesting, thought-provoking reading once again.

For this second interview we were delighted to work with the following sector leaders:

Keep reading