From Purpose to Action: Building a Sustainable Future Together

Last month, Dow Packaging and Specialty Plastics and Fast Company co-hosted the virtual summit to convene policy experts, industry leaders and innovators with the expertise and resources to drive real progress toward a circular economy.

While flexible packaging plays an important role in keeping food fresher longer, it has long been difficult to recycle. Designing more recyclable flexible packaging from the start and determining a better end-of-life process for current materials is a vital step in reducing food waste.

Recognizing the value of education both as a strategic initiative for preparing future brand employees and as an opportunity to help shape a more sustainable value chain.

A circular plastics supply chain is still in its infancy. So, how do we work together to create a viable marketplace for advanced recycling to thrive? Here are a few strategies and approaches that show early promise.

In Latin America, where recycling rates remain below 10%, grassroots circular solutions are slowly beginning to scale — thanks to growing legitimacy, education, organization and protections for informal waste workers, who remain the backbone of the region’s collection and recycling infrastructure.

Dow is leading the charge in materials science, but we can’t do that science in a box without thinking about communities and the people within them. Nonprofit partnerships help us dig to the root of the most pressing problems in sustainability, find the best solutions and gain public buy-in to create real impact.

The platform highlights and connects individuals who are enacting river-beneficial solutions in their own communities. These 'River Heroes' represent efforts that start on a local scale but create ripple effects that expand beyond.

Enabling a circular economy is a complicated challenge that governments, communities and businesses globally are struggling to solve. But as Dow’s work in Africa proves, solutions exist — and success comes when organizations and communities collaborate to create change rooted in local context.

The overall puzzle of ocean restoration is complex; but to Dow, it is clear that organized cleanups are one of the most important pieces — because they can create a spark that will ignite the type of passion it takes to drive change.

“We’ve been working on design for recyclability for years now. But the next step is to make packaging fully recyclable and then collect the packaging to recycle it into new products. We’re very close to creating a low-carbon, circular economy.” — Han Zhang

Despite more leagues and arenas introducing initiatives to curb waste from concessions and encourage recycling, the science and innovation necessary to create lasting impact across the board (or the court or field) are still missing. That's where Dow and its partners come in.

Dow Sustainability Director Julie Zaniewski kicks off this conversation series by sharing insights into how the chemical giant is shaking up business as usual to deliver solutions.

Rather than focus solely on plastic alternatives, we must consider the full lifecycle of materials to see the benefits of circularity. Three technologies are surfacing as viable solutions to increase plastic’s circularity with low-carbon performance at the core.

These investments offer proof-of-concept for scaling more investments in waste infrastructure across North America. Modernizing Sims’ recycling capabilities acts as a circularity laboratory, which can lead to better design for the whole US recycling system.

When it comes to making sustainable business a reality, the journey is just as important as the destination. Few companies prove this more than Dow — provider of many of the chemical, plastic and consumer solutions that the world needs to successfully transition to a low-carbon economy.

Disasters such as the aftermath of the February 2021 ice storm that left millions of Texans without running water lay bare the urgent need for updated utility infrastructure across the US. This would involve repairing and replacing hundreds of thousands of miles of water piping — but what should be used in their place?

Solving the ongoing packaging conundrum demands a significant shift in how businesses think — moving from a linear to a circular model of operation to improve the amount of packaging that can be reused, recycled and returned to the value chain.

In order for truly sustainable and circular systems to be realized, every facet of normal life must be re-considered — from the cars we drive to the roads we drive them on.