Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - 23

Q&A
At Trinseo, we believe that
the future, both for plastics
and for our business, depends
upon achieving a circular
economy in which we keep
resources in use for as long as
possible, extracting the most
potential value from them while
in use, and recovering and
regenerating materials at the
end of each service life.
Walter van het Hof
Trinseo
You joined Trinseo in 2017.
Was corporate sustainability
on the agenda at Trinseo at
that point?
Sustainability has been embedded into Trinseo's core values
since our inception, and over the
past 10 years, we've made remarkable progress furthering our
commitments to protecting society, the environment, our employees, and our communities.
When I joined Trinseo, the
business had just released its
2018 Sustainability CSR Report
which profiled how our products were helping customers
improve their own sustainability in areas such as vehicle lightweighting, green tire
technologies, media device
design flexibility, LED horticulture lighting and more. Today,
Trinseo is continuing to lead the
industry in these areas but we
have gone even further in our
sustainability journey.
At Trinseo, we believe that
the future, both for plastics and
for our business, depends upon
achieving a circular economy
in which we keep resources
in use for as long as possible,
extracting the most potential
value from them while in use,
and recovering and regenerating materials at the end of each
service life. We're making enormous progress in this direction
through initiatives such as Styrenics Circular Solutions, and
Operation Clean Sweep.
Our work does not end there
though: Trinseo is committed
to rethinking sustainability;
considering different business
models, and pushing to truly

close the loop on circularity.
This does not just mean aiding
the collection and recycling
process for plastics but also
looking at the sustainability of
raw materials, the production
process and even logistics.
Embedding sustainability
in a corporate culture: is
that a top-down or bottomup process? What are the
challenges?
In truth, sustainability for
Trinseo sits somewhere in the
middle. Sustainability is an
area of business we take very
seriously - indeed, it occupies
a primary place on our board
and like other businesses in
the plastics value chain, sustainability encompasses system-level changes driven by
policy and operational directives. For that reason you could
say that we have a top-down
culture, but in reality, Trinseo's
goal is to influence policy
through behavior, which could
be considered more of a bottom-up approach.
When we discussed our Sustainability Goal setting for the
years ahead, it was important
that we were not merely 'ticking a box,' but that we were
moving towards a unified effort
to drive real progress in sustainability both throughout the
Trinseo business and throughout the value chain. We wanted
our goals to motivate everyone
throughout the company to continuously do better; go further,
and challenge ourselves to create a more sustainable future.
continued on page 24

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September/October 2020

23


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Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020

Contents
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - Cover1
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - Cover2
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - Contents
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - 4
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - 5
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - 6
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - 7
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - 8
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - 9
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - 10
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - 11
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - 12
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - 13
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - 14
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - 15
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Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - 23
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Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - 25
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - 26
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - 27
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - 28
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Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - 33
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - 34
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - Cover3
Sustainable Plastics - September/October 2020 - Cover4
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