The head of a company that makes plastic products from oil products isn’t necessarily the person you would think would want to jump into a conversation about the environment.
But that’s exactly what happened when James Fitterling, chairman and CEO of Dow, sat down to talk to Fortune’s Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt for Leadership Next, a podcast about the changing rules of business leadership.
“One of the challenges with any energy-intensive company is, how do you get to a net-zero future with carbon? And with plastics in particular, how do you deal with creating a circular economy out of the waste?” Fitterling says. “We’ve set targets to do both. We said that by 2050, we’ll take [Dow] down to a net-zero position. And by 2030, we want to make a substantial impact on plastic waste by taking a million metric tons a year out of the waste stream, and recycling it back into our products.”
Murray and McGirt also talk to Fitterling about how he answers people who look at Dow as flat-out problematic because the company produces plastics; innovation; and why, on the product side, as Fitterling says, “circularity is the answer.”
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