Sustainable Development Strategic Priorities

A key step in providing focus for our SD efforts has been defining four Strategic Priorities for Sustainable Development (SD):

• Reducing our footprint
• Sustaining value chains
• Building social capital
• Creating our future

These priorities help to define where SD can be most effectively implemented across the Shell chemicals companies and highlight the typical actions that need to be taken. The following sections outline each of the priorities and the associated actions in more detail.

1) Reducing our footprint

The operations of the Shell chemicals companies are relatively energy and materials intensive. Improvements in operating efficiencies must continue to be made to reduce emissions, waste, energy, and the resources required (our ‘footprint’), while at the same time increasing production and, through associated efficiencies, our overall financial performance.

2) Sustaining value chains

The chemicals industry is involved in a complex web of value chains and, as a supplier of basic hydrocarbon building blocks, the Shell chemicals companies participate in many of them.

The long term growth and profitability of our business is dependent on the health of the value chains in which we choose to participate. We also need to understand and take opportunities to impact the various steps in these value chains, as they collectively determine our overall contribution to sustainable development.

Some of our actions include:

• helping customers and suppliers to reduce their waste, emissions, energy intensity, and cost;
• working with end users to find ways to reduce material consumption;
• pursuing product stewardship programmes that focus on the health and safety of products along the full value chain;
• identifying the critical aspects of the major value chains we engage in that might impact the longer term success of those chains, and working cooperatively with industry and non-industry partners to find solutions.
  

3) Building social capital

Social capital is built up through the ability and willingness of people and societies to work together. It encompasses having trust, common objectives, skills, effective institutions, and many other elements. This priority area addresses the need to enhance the understanding of and increase trust in the chemical industry - a barrier to building social capital - and will require actions such as the following:

• achieving excellence in community interactions, and wider aspects of social engagement, wherever we operate;
• building local skill bases to enable local communities to participate and benefit from economic growth;
• strengthening local institutions to enable good governance and access to the views of local communities;
• dealing transparently with local and global institutions to build credibility and pass the increasingly demanding tests of global, public scrutiny.

There is also an internal aspect to building social capital requiring a focus on areas such as promoting diversity, providing skills training, ensuring safe working conditions, and enabling a reasonable work/life balance.

4) Creating our future

In rising to the on-going challenge of Sustainable Development, it is essential that Shell chemicals companies continue to innovate, both technically and in shaping their collective business strategy. So ‘creating our future’ reflects a commitment to innovation and to developing products and processes that respond to society’s evolving needs. The chemicals sector has long been a source of innovation, in response to changing demands, and its long term future will be dependent on an innovative renewal process.

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