Product stewardship is an integral part of the worldwide plastics industry's  Responsible Care® programme. What Product Stewardship means is the responsible and ethical management of the health, safety and environmental aspects of a chemical product throughout its life cycle.
 

This involves monitoring all products, from the raw materials necessary for their manufacture to their storage, handling, use, recycling and disposal, including all transport requirements.

Through Product Stewardship, we can meet customer demands for products which are safer and have a lower impact on the environment. To do so, we have to look at the environmental and health implications at every stage of a product's life and also make sure that everyone all the way down the supply chain does the same. We do this because we want to give our customers the help they need to ensure their own safety, as well as the safety of the environment when they handle products and dispose of waste. This is something which is rightly developing into part of our normal business practice.

Managing the Production Process

This is an important element of Product Stewardship. As a member of Plastics Europe (the Association of Plastics Manufacturers in Europe) and ECVM (the European Council of Vinyl Manufacturers), Solvay accepts that all manufacturing and disposal processes have an environmental impact.

We have committed ourselves to a programme of continuous improvement in environmental performance which includes investing in research aimed at finding ways to improve our processes and technologies. Our  Vinyloop® and Recafuta technologies are evidence of this commitment. We also review our targets and areas for future action annually, and ensure that they meet the objectives agreed by these organisations.

The Product Life Cycle

The industry-wide  Responsible Care® programme requires us to ensure that any adverse effects that our end-products and their distribution may have on the environment are kept to an absolute minimum. We  also take into consideration what happens to our products when they reach the end of their working lives. These concerns all form part of our commitment to managing our products' lifecycles, from 'cradle to grave'.

The best example of this policy is the  voluntary commitment of the PVC industry chain, signed in 2000, in which our subsidiary SolVin was always a very active partner.

We promote eco-efficiency in the way in which all our products are used. We make sure that all our products are as easy to recycle as possible and we design technologies such as  Vinyloop® and Recafuta to ensure this. We endeavour to use the energy required to manufacture our products efficiently, and we constantly strive to reduce the levels of toxic substances to a minimum. We also work with manufacturers to help them to get much more from much less. In other words, we encourage them to make products which are designed to use less material and to last longer. Only by doing all of this can we ensure that our products have the greatest possible beneficial effect on everyone who comes into contact with them at every stage of their lifecycle.