Читать книгу Practical Sustainability Strategies - George P. Nassos - Страница 44

In 2000, together with the Environment Agency in the United Kingdom, TNS published a report on the challenges the polyvinyl chloride (PVC) industry must address to align its activities with the four system conditions for sustainability [10]. The report highlighted five key sustainability challenges and followed an extensive study of PVC including consensus-building workshops with industry, NGOs, retailers, and regulators. Over the years these challenges have provided a reference point for the industry, initially in the United Kingdom and subsequently across Europe. The most proactive organizations in the sector have been working to address them.

On June 22, 2011, the European PVC industry launched VinylPlus—a new voluntary commitment to enhance the sustainable production and use of PVC by 2020. It is no secret that PVC is a controversial material that has both critics and supporters, so when an entire industry consortium mobilizes around a voluntary commitment such as this, it is surely a positive sign that sustainable development is being taken seriously in the board rooms of major corporations.

On top of this, the VinylPlus initiative represents an expanded scope and level of ambition over prior efforts. Targets are derived from TNS System Conditions for sustainability and build on previous work in the sector.

Over the last eight years, through a series of activities, TNS has worked with the board of the initiative to review and map out the challenges for PVC, offer capacity building workshops, gather stakeholder views and provide recommendations on the formulation of the new industry charter.

They used the ABCD planning process to help industry leaders apply the framework and arrive at the priorities. They did this by first beginning with a vision of where the industry wants to head, identifying challenges that must be overcome, generating ideas on what needs to be done, and finally arriving at priorities and targets for the period to 2020.

Before deciding on the priorities and actions to be undertaken, they contacted 113 stakeholders across Europe on behalf of the board of Vinyl2010 with a briefing on the challenges they had identified together with industry representatives. Information from these stakeholders were used in the formulation of exact goals and targets.

They were pleased to see an increased level of ambition in VinylPlus and believe it sets out a clear roadmap for the industry. Proof will nevertheless be in the action, and it will be judged by whether targets are met and stakeholders feel their views are being heard.

Moving forward TNS's role will be to follow the new initiative in the following capacity:

1 Critical friend—Challenging and advising the industry to make progress while ensuring the initiative retains the direct link to TNS system conditions for sustainability.

2 Stakeholder intermediary—Encouraging constant external monitoring and communication with external stakeholders

3 Capacity builder—Supporting industry to integrate sustainability principles into their operations in order to achieve the goals set out in the initiative