Growing Dow’s Impact Through 2025 Sustainability Goals
Originally published in Dow's 2022 INtersections Progress Report
Our 10-year 2025 Sustainability Goals seek to enable the transition to a sustainable planet and society through science, innovation and collaboration. A common thread across our seven 2025 Sustainability Goals is our focus on finding collaborative solutions that will lead to transformative changes and more sustainable ways to do business.
PROGRESS AGAINST OUR 2025 GOALS: CREATING VALUE TO DOW AND BEYOND
Launched in 2015, our 2025 Sustainability Goals are our third generation of sustainability goals and important drivers of integrating sustainable practices into our day-to-day business practices. Aligned to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, our 2025 Goals set the foundation for Dow to take leadership roles in our industry around our priorities of Climate Protection, Circular Economy and Safer Materials.
As we approach 2025, we are proud of the progress we’ve made with our 2025 Goals, including:
- Achieving two goals – Leading the Blueprint and Delivering Breakthrough Innovations – ahead of schedule. We have integrated the processes and learnings from their implementation into our day-to-day business practices. For example, in launching our Delivering Breakthrough Innovations Goal in 2015, we focused on increasing the net positive impact of our products, based upon knowledge of where our feedstocks and energy come from and the designs of our processes, how our products are used by customers, and how they are treated at end of life. Today, our businesses have transitioned from using the Sustainable Chemistry Index developed by Dow to track our goal progress to the Dow Innovation Portfolio Sustainability Assessment, which is a sciencebased, future-oriented and customer-centric tool that helps us assess our product portfolio and embed sustainability in our key business decisions. In addition, our businesses now set their own business-specific sustainability goals and track progress on outcomes.
- Building upon the learnings and tools developed from our goals to inform next-generation strategies, including our Transform the Waste target and development of our Biodiversity and Safer Materials strategies.
- Growing our impact by publicly sharing our findings. Examples include the ESII tool developed through our Valuing Nature Goal and our Blueprint Thinking Toolkit, as well as our collaborative blueprints on topics such as safer materials, water and nature.
- Continued focus on operational excellence through our four World-Leading Operations indices: Unplanned Events, Environmental Stewardship, Total Worker Health® and Transportation Stewardship.
2022 Highlights (View the image above)
Additional information on our 2025 Sustainability Goals can be found here.
Innovation: Supporting Recyclers to Increase High-Quality PCR Resins
To ensure high-quality PCR plastic resins, recycled plastics must be cleaned. The optimization of this process can be challenging, especially removing contaminants and properly separating materials such as labels, as well as controlling foam during the required washing steps.
Dow has developed an innovative washing technology called EVOWASH™. EVOWASH is a range of biodegradable, industrial-grade detergents and antifoams designed to maximize adhesive removal, improve the optical quality of plastic resins, and reduce foam generation in the mechanical recycling of PET, HDPE, LDPE and PP. Because EVOWASH™ detergents are biodegradable and generate low foam, they also have no impact on discharge water. The technology is an example of how Dow is using its materials science expertise to help accelerate the global transition to a circular economy for plastics.
