After taking part in a Volans salon on the role of Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs) in the 2020s, I head off to Dusseldorf for the K-Fair, Europe’s biggest plastics exhibition. Clear that the industry feels under growing pressure, as it should. Spoke at a Covestro event alongside Lise Kingo of the UN Global Compact and Covestro CEO Markus Steilemann. I had interesting meetings with Markus and his new Chief Commercial Officer, Sucheta Govil, while there.
Easy to see why people find plastics so obsessively interesting, but they feature as one of my ‘Black Swan’ case studies in the new book, Green Swans, due to be published by Fast Company Press in April 2020. Few sectors are now in more urgent need to exponentially evolving Green Swan solutions.
Speaking of which, I dropped in on UBQ Materials’ stand – which was throbbing with people. Their carbon-positive plastics have come on by leaps and bounds, offering multiple colours and all made from domestic garbage. They sent me a coat hanger made from UBQ, to use at the Swedish Fashion Council conference I was meant to be speaking at in Stockholm, but that was cancelled at the very last moment, the day before I was meant to travel.