Making the Annual Report allows us each year to not only reflect on what EPCA has accomplished in the past year but also to sit back and look at the bigger picture.
With the 2010 EPCA Annual Meeting with its record attendance of 2.400 delegates and the 2010 EPCA Interactive Supply Chain Workshop, it becomes clear that EPCA lives up to its mission of being the platform to meet for the global chemical business community and of promoter of the chemical industry as a provider of solutions for sustainable development. EPCA’s focus and purpose result from the vision and constant practice in the past ten years. Since 2000 EPCA has put at the forefront of its Annual Meeting business sessions program a theme showing how the chemical industry contributes to sustainable development in one or the other aspect of sustainability. Sustainable development and corporate social responsibility as a whole were addressed in the meetings of 2000 and 2002, whilst in 2005 we promoted and demonstrated that chemical products improve our daily life and human well being. The economic dimension of sustainability was challenged in 2001 by examining the competitive advantage of concentrations in the chemical industry and in 2003 by looking at the global competitiveness of the European chemical industry. In 2004 we focused on the human aspect of sustainability by promoting how our industry recognizes the value of people and the need to constantly develop them and in 2007 we showed that our industry takes advantage of the diversity in the workforce and of the different, complementary skills of the people employed by the many international companies that form part of our membership. Energy and hydrocarbons were at the heart of the debate in 2006 and 2008, with attention for hydrocarbons as building blocks for the chemical industry. The latter has been clearly positioned as an enabler of solutions for sustainable development in the 2009 meeting. The 2010 EPCA Annual Meeting with its theme “Nine Billion People in 2050” positioned the chemical industry as an enabler of solutions to allow these nine billion people access to food, drinkable water, energy, decent housing, healthy and education, both from a general business perspective and from a supply chain point of view.
In its supply chain and logistics activities, EPCA has constantly stressed the need for building trust and partnerships between producers and service providers in order to optimize supply chains both for economic and environmental impact reasons, whilst ensuring strict compliance with competition law. In the 2007 EPCA “cluster” think tank, EPCA even promoted the use of multi-stakeholders partnerships not only between producers and service providers, but also between producers, service providers, customers and even authorities in order to evolve to a different and more sustainable business model. The chemical clusters already demonstrate impressive energy efficiencies and emission reductions but can be improved substantially through enhanced multi-stakeholder co-operation, further integration and connectivity between clusters, beyond different national borders and interests.
With the above business session approach and reporting of the results of the discussions as broadly as possible after the meetings, EPCA has and will continue to contribute to the improvement of the public perception of our industry both within and outside the chemical community.
The EPCA Annual Report also contains a members index – an additional tool to network.
For more information, you can consult the new EPCA 2010 Annual Report here http://www.epca.eu/public/content/AboutEPCA/annualreport2010/docs/annualreport2010.pdf
meets the world’s needs
