Sustainability Lacks a Common Meaning—How +Vantage Vinyl Can Help

What’s interesting about sustainability is while it has a definition, the meaning is different depending on the goals of a specific individual, company, or industry. What’s more is that you will never reach an end goal of being sustainable; there will always be more you can do—you or your company will always be working towards being more sustainable. And sustainability practices are constantly changing and adapting to meet the needs of the world.

Formosa Plastics, a pilot participant in +Vantage Vinyl shares similar sentiments.

“It’s been over a decade since we established sustainable development principals and laid the basic groundwork,” said John Pastuck, Formosa’s assistant vice president of environment, health, safety and sustainability. “But that doesn’t mean we can let these remain stagnant. We’re often reevaluating our existing principals and learning what we can do better—how we can be more sustainable.”

As a participant of +Vantage Vinyl, companies must choose at least three goals that align with the program’s three impact categories, resource efficiency, emissions, and health and safety, that are mapped to 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) where we can make the most impact. To combat emissions to water, Formosa is providing water emissions information that will be used to consolidate an industry-level report on resin production water emissions.

Recognizing that water is a critical raw material for the plant, Formosa has an extensive water conservation and water reuse program already in place. For example, plants use a variety of different types of water at different purity levels. Perhaps you have a discharge from your deionized water stream, so it’s no longer deionized and can’t be used as such, it may be perfectly acceptable to supplement as plant utility water.

“The water recycling program we have is pretty elaborate,” Pastuck said. “But the results are twofold: we’re helping the environment and it’s also incredibly cost effective to utilize this resource to its full potential.”

Additionally, to fulfill a waste management goal, Formosa is contributing company recycling data to assist in identifying an existing recycling baseline per market segment for aggregation and set industry level post-consumer resource efficiency and recycling targets. Formosa’s waste management program is pretty straightforward: they don’t dispose of any PVC. “We try to recover as much PVC as possible,” Pastuck said. “There’s reactor cleanout; there’s pit sludge. There’s all these other materials that can’t be sold as prime grade but we can find a home for all of it in one form or another.”

On top of that, Formosa has clearly established programs for minimizing hazardous waste and pollution prevention programs already in place. All of their manufacturing sites are also certified under the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14001, which specifies requirements for an effective environmental management system, and they have to demonstrate to their registrar every six months how they’re making progress toward pollution prevention.

So even though Formosa already had many of these practices in place prior to joining +Vantage Vinyl, what’s the benefit of having an industry-wide sustainability initiative? Why join +Vantage Vinyl?

It goes back to how sustainability can have such a broad definition.

“As much as people talk about this stuff—sustainability, sustainable development—the actions companies take and how they measure their sustainability efforts can largely vary,” Pastuck said. “Having an industry-wide sustainable development model, like +Vantage Vinyl, helps coordinate the process and provides a method to benchmark our progress within an industry sector.”

For Formosa, the true advantage of having a program like this is it allows companies to better understand what their company can do to contribute to the industry’s sustainability goals. And it allows the vinyl industry to narrow the meaning of sustainable development into some common core principals that we can all agree on.

For other companies considering joining +Vantage Vinyl, the program can really give you a jumping off point to assessing where you are in your sustainability journey.

“Look at the process as an opportunity to evaluate your business and determine how the overall principles best fit your organization—it’s not a one-size-fits-all process,” Pastuck said. “Be willing to reach out and try new things.”