Global chemicals industry

Global chemicals industry, 24 264. See also World entries... 

With rapidly changing competitive conditions in the global chemical industry, it is more important than ever to be able to determine confidently and quickly... 

The global chemicals industry will total about 3.5 trillion in 2010, or about 6% of global GDP. 

Many of the processes new to this edition reflect recent trends in the global chemical industry. There is now much less emphasis on new processes for making basic chemicals and more emphasis on pollution prevention and waste disposal. Petrochemical processes, based on petroleum and natural gas, are giving way to biochemical processes, using a variety of sources of biomass. 

What is the significance of the universality of the only international agreement to provide for the elimination of an entire category of weapons of mass destruction The members of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) already represent nearly 95 per cent of the earth s population and landmass and 98 per cent of global chemical industry. These are, of course, only raw statistics. But the issue of universality of instruments such as the Chemical Weapons Convention unearths a number of other, sometimes contentious, issues. 

The global chemical industry today produces tens of thousands of substances. The substances can be mixed by the chemical industry and sold and used in this form, or they can be mixed by downstream customers of the chemical industry (e.g., retail stores that sell paint). It is important to note that most of the output from chemical companies is used by other chemical companies or other industries (e.g., metal, glass, electronics), and chemicals produced by the chemical industry are present in countless products used by consumers (e.g., automobiles, toys, paper, clothing) (OECD, 2001). 

The Responsible Care Global Charter contains nine key elements. They commit the global chemical industry to ... 

ICCA, On the Road to Sustainability - A Contribution from the Global Chemical Industry to the World Summit on Sustainable Development, ICCA, August 2002. 

Responsible Care is the global chemical industry s environmental, health and safety (EHS) initiative to drive continuous improvement in performance. It achieves this objective by meeting and going beyond legislative and regulatory compliance, and by adopting cooperative and voluntary initiatives with government and other stakeholders. Responsible Care is both an ethic and a commitment and... 

The global chemical industry will develop and share information and practices across companies consistent with competition law and other legal requirements. 

The global chemical industry will extend existing local, national and global dialogue processes to enable the industry to address the concerns and expectations of external stakeholders to aid in the continuing development of Responsible Care. 

Analysis of current practice In the global chemicals Industry... 

The CERs analysed in Chapter 6 are of companies or divisions whose main business is chemicals. Table 7.2 shows their approximate position within the global chemicals industry based on turnover. 

Moreover, rapid changes encoimtered in recent years in fossil-fuel prices, raw feedstock prices, and the global chemical industry infrastmcture and supply base mean that price relationships calculated today, likely, won t stay the same next year (or even the next month). However, a certain truism will always hold—decisions about additives based on the cost must always be weighed against what value the additive wiU actually provide for the resin product. In particular, a few specific trade-offs might be considered as follows ... 

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