The Vinyl Council’s 2024 Annual General Meeting and Networking Event is on 19 November 2024.

This AGM brings together Members of the VCA from the PVC industry in Australia to share information and foster connections through networking.

The Earth ecosystem operates on cyclic flows of matter and energy, a system within which all life including humanity co-evolved. Our ingenuity has since become a double-edged sword, material use and innovation granting us unprecedented progress yet contributing to many of the threats now impinging on future progress. Regulatory controls have largely been reactive and narrowly framed, creating a perception that there are inherently ‘good’ and ‘bad’ materials; this is a false dichotomy if evaluated outside of the context of the full societal life cycles of products into which substances are integrated. The ‘Brundtland definition’ of sustainable development, to which the world signed up in 1987, is all about meeting human needs now and into the future, yet the regulatory legacy has refocused attention largely on potential bad outcomes based on intrinsic chemistry in isolation: hazard divorced from ‘real world’ risks.
Both the meeting of needs and associated risks need to be balanced in a full life cycle context. The ‘Five Sustainability Challenges for PVC’, published by The Natural Step in 2000, have driven substantial progress with voluntary commitment to sustainable development in the sector, particularly in Europe as they were taken up under the Vinyl Plus initiative. One of these Challenges pertains to the sustainable use of additives, their use in a whole life cycle context being key. Many widely used chemical assessment tools are assumed to represent sustainability, yet fall well short of systemic coverage when assessed against a suite of sustainability principles.
Tools explicitly based on those wider sustainability principles, for example Additive Sustainability Footprint (ASF) developed to support the ‘sustainable use of additives’ Challenge, compare strongly as a basis for evaluation and innovation. The five Challenges for PVC and of the ASF tool were deliberately designed to be generically relevant – applicable to all materials and not just to PVC – and publications have illustratively demonstrated how PVC and various other materials, including their diverse additives, compare on a truly ‘level playing field’.
The world faces daunting and possibly existential sustainability challenges, in the face of which how best to meet human and environmental needs in the most efficient and safe manner needs to become a priority in application, regulation and innovation, undertaken in a ‘material blind’ manner founded on a scientifically informed ‘level playing field’ of sustainability principles.