For Jim Fitterling, chairman and CEO of Dow Chemical, the emergence of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic was, in the words of baseball legend and homespun philosopher Yogi Berra, "like deja vu all over again."
"It feels like 1987 from a financial market standpoint. It feels like 9/11 in terms of the way things shut down in the aerospace industry," Fitterling said, adding that this uncertain period of time also somewhat resembles the financial landscapes of 2008 and 2009.
"But it's different in scope and scale in that it's a rolling pandemic that's moving around the world," Fitterling said. "That's very different from anything we've seen in the past."
As industries scramble to adapt to and mitigate the impact of the pandemic, Fitterling noted at least one positive shift for the petrochemical sector: "Safety, health, hygiene and security" continue to be chief priorities for businesses and consumers alike.
"But we've seen a big change in sentiment," Fitterling remarked during a recent online leadership dialogue for CERAWeek by IHS Markit. "Most dramatic, I'd say, is the grocery stores and retailers saying, 'We don't want reusable bags coming into the stores. We'd rather issue clean, new, sanitary, disposable, one-time bags.'
"I do believe that this COVID-19 pandemic is going to be with us for a little while, and then we'll figure out how to have therapeutics and a vaccine to treat it. But people are recognizing the value of chemicals and plastics and how they can be helpful in this fight [by providing] basic things like sanitation, food containers and food packaging."
Beyond COVID-19
Despite their usefulness during a pandemic, however, Fitterling said he recognizes the issue of plastics waste is still a viable concern.
"I don't believe that some of the longterm issues we face [with] plastics are going to go away," he said, adding that he believes the greatest challenges to reducing plastics waste are economics and infrastructure.
"It's cheaper today to make a virgin plastic material than it is to recycle anything and bring it back into the economy, so that isn't going to create a sustainable, circular economy," he said. "What you need is an infrastructure in place that encourages our products to be brought back and recycled."
Fitterling shared that his home state of Michigan requires a 10-cent deposit on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles.
"When you buy a soda pop bottle or [other] beverage bottle [and] there's a 10-cent deposit, then you bring it back, [and] you see very high recycle rates," Fitterling said. He explained that when the consumer returns the bottle to "a reverse-vending machine, they get the money back and spend it at the store."
A high-quality bale of recycled material goes back to the converters, Fitterling said, where it becomes new bottles or PET fibers for fabrics.
"We need to be able to do that with more plastics and change the mindset that plastics are waste to the mindset that they can be reused," he said.
That concept requires infrastructure, Fitterling said.
"Today, in most places, a landfill is where a lot of that material would go, and a landfill is relatively cheap," he said. "But the landfill is not the right answer either. And if we go into places where there are no landfills and no open dumps, then we end up with plastic waste in the ocean or in the rivers -- an issue we're all trying to deal with.
"We're all on board with creating a circular economy. And I think the people trying to portray the industry as 'evil' are starting to see -- because of this COVID-19 situation -- that there is value these products bring to society."
Dr. Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of IHS Markit, moderated the conversation.
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