The Chemical Industries Association (CIA) is holding its first-ever session on corporate social responsibility at next month’s annual conference.
The hour-long plenary session is part of the association’s efforts to widen the range of corporate responsibility issues considered by its members, who have so far focused mainly on health and safety and the environment.
The CSR session at the annual conference in London on 24 January will include presentations from James Smith, executive vice president of Shell Chemicals, Alois Flatz, head of research at Swiss-based SAM Sustainability Group, and John Edmonds, general secretary of the GMB union.
CSR will be one of the main themes of the conference, which is titled ‘Sustainability and competitiveness: concord or conflict?’
A year ago the CIA, which has 170 members including AtoFina, BASF, Bayer, DuPont and ICI, published a ‘leadership statement’ that added social considerations to its existing environmental commitments (EP2, issue 8). The statement says the CIA expects its members to commit to:
ethical trading
stakeholder dialogue
play an active role in local communities
diversity measures
a healthy work/life balance.
The association will hold workshops and training events to help member companies put the commitments into practice.
Judith Hackitt, CIA director for business and responsible care, said: ‘Sustainable development has now become a very big part of our agenda. Having published our leadership statement, the next phase is to raise awareness in the industry through a series of presentations – and the conference session will play a key part in that. From now on we will pretty much be raising this issue at all our events.’
Hackitt said the CIA was also developing, with Surrey University, workshops and training courses on sustainable development for chemical industry managers. ‘We need to help companies develop management systems and benchmarks on social principles and to give people practical advice on how to implement sustainable development,’ she said.
The Surrey University programme, which is being drawn up with the Institution of Chemical Engineers and partly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, may be taken either in free-standing sections or as part of a master’s degree.
The CIA is developing social standards in areas such as supply chain monitoring and responsible purchasing, although it stresses this work is at an early stage.
Nearly all European chemical companies (92 per cent) now have environmental policies but only two-thirds (63 per cent) said they were putting in place environmental management systems to implement them, according to an OECD corporate responsibility survey published in 2001.