Interview with Neil Hawkins, The Dow Chemical Company

In this Enterprise 2020 interview, Neil Hawkins, Vice President Sustainability and EH&S at The Dow Chemical Company, discusses the role of the chemical industry in addressing global sustainability challenges.

The interview with Neil Hawkins is the fifth in a series of interviews on the future of responsible enterprise with business leaders from CSR Europe's member companies.

You can watch a video of the interview below.

Interview with Neil Hawkins, The Dow Chemical Company 

What is the role of chemistry in solving world challenges, and how has Dow positioned itself to be a leader in that role?

Chemistry is really part of the foundation that we need to solve the world challenges. Some people think of chemistry as a challenge, but actually chemistry is the solution to the challenges.

Dow has positioned itself well, allowing our people to be motivated and inspired to think about how to take the power of chemistry to solve things like climate change, infrastructure challenges, food, nutrition, public health, and actually having consumer products - and growing consumer products - in a more sustainable way.

We are spending 1.6 billion dollars per year in research, more than all US chemistry and chemical engineering departments combined, and harness that passion of people to work in innovation to help solve the world's challenges. Chemistry is the answer.

What key social and environmental trends will have the most impact on Dow's success? How will your products and services address them?

Probably one of the biggest trends we are seeing right now is a call for more transparency. Every day people all over the world are taking more responsibility for making decisions themselves, as they believe it relates to their environment, their personal safety and their family safety.

Transparency is a big trend and we are meeting that head on. We have very progressive reporting: we do a third party validated GRI report and we do quarterly reporting against our 2015 sustainability goals.

Another big trend is in the area of biodiversity and ecosystem services, and how that builds back into economic decisions and capital decisions in terms of our products. Let me give you a few examples. We have solar shingles for homes, very high-tech and thin film materials; We have batteries for hybrid cars. This is Dow Chemical - you wouldn't necessary think of us as a solar cell company or as a battery producer. In the materials area, we were recently awarded again another US EPA Presidential Green Chemistry award for a new process to produce propylene-oxide, an important industrial chemical. We figured out a process with automatic reductions in waste, water use, greenhouse gas impact and so on.

When you combine all this with our emphasis in zero emission homes, solar energy, new insulation materials, I think we are really on track to meet the needs of the future. I think we are doing the societal aspects of this pretty well by increasing our transparency and doing a lot of public reporting.

How does Dow work with its stakeholders in order to address the world's most pressing challenges?

When you think about these really big challenges, like clean drinking water for the poor, scarce water resources, food, or nutrition and public health, I think it's pretty obvious that the world is not going to solve these challenges without significant and unusual collaboration.

We have gone out to work with many different partners - different sorts of customers or people in different industries we wouldn't have typically worked with as partners, and in many emerging geographies, with partnerships in China, in Brazil and elsewhere. We are sharing information and best practices, but also learning how we could most effectively become part of an economy.

We work a lot with NGOs. As representatives of civil society, they are often the most direct way to listen, learn and understand the expectations of stakeholders and then allow ourselves and our people to understand so they can act, and develop products and services that deliver value for customers yet, at the same time, meet stakeholder needs.

How will your company need to change in the next ten years in order to make your vision a reality?

I think for external stakeholders, having a spirit of listening, and really understanding their concerns is very important.

Another area that is changing a lot is demographics. When you look at the growth of a global company like Dow, we are hiring many people in emerging geographies - we have hired several thousands in China in the last five to seven years. In our established geographies, like Europe, there is also a lot of hiring going on to keep our workforce vibrant and new, because we have an ageing population in some countries. So there is a lot of hiring going on.

This hiring needs to be done very thoughtfully. I'm looking for people who are technically savvy, business savvy, but also come into work thinking at a high-level "20,000 foot" view, understanding where their activities fit in a world system and what contributions they are making. How can they, in their personal lives and their personal decisions, make a difference through their jobs?

I don't care if they are in China, in Berlin or New York, but these kinds of people are the ones you want to have in your organisation. They have the technical skills, the business know-how, and the passion and drive to actually translate that into making a difference in the world.

I see these big demographic changes as a great opportunity to make an even greater company moving forward.

Speaking to a class of schoolchildren in the year 2020, what would you tell them are the most important things you learned in the past ten years?

I would say, looking back to the past ten years, we would have learned that innovation delivers. I think there will have been tremendous change for the positive. Many of the challenges we are facing today would have been solved through ingenuity, know-how, elbow grease and just raw passion to make things happen, to deliver a better world. But to do all that, you need to have technical savvy, business skills, passion and a strong ethics and value system that underpin your actions.

What is the most important future challenge you would entrust to this next generation?

As a trend, if you look at an affluent society - and societies get more affluent - fewer and fewer students actually study technical subjects. You have fewer chemists and engineers as society gets richer. This is a big challenge for all of us as employers: We really have to get moving about promoting science and technical education worldwide. Next Year (2011) will be the International Year of Chemistry and this will be a good opportunity to do that.

These trends don't favour us if we don't get in front of schoolchildren, motivate them and make them excited about the wonders of science, to actually make change happen. Show them that these are great careers, very fulfilling, and we will help solve the world's challenges. That's a responsibility we all have in our organisations wherever we sit. We have to make sure there is a strong focus on technical education and a balanced population in terms of careers.

Read more:

• Sustainability at Dow

Interview by Colleen M. Fletcher
Edited by Sarah Dekkiche