Construction Week Middle East sits down with Abdulla Al-Otaibi, general manager of Saudi-based chemical manufacturing company SABIC to learn more about Engineering Thermoplastic Products (ETP) and how advanced consumer solutions have helped the company reach new heights.
What exciting opportunities are you addressing in hygiene & healthcare and electrical & electronics?
Polyolefin or ETP products, as well as internal capabilities, add value and support the industry. Hence to continue its strategy of customer centricity, SABIC is further expanding its market-facing approach by adding HC as a new segment to further intensify customer intimacy and provide more focused solutions. These additions of “hygiene & healthcare” industries will enable SABIC to accelerate the pace of innovation and promptly respond to changing market trends.
We have aligned our organisation to effectively support customers’ needs and offer them the level of service required to create significant value for them.
Why is Advanced Consumer Solutions important to your business? What ways do you address it with your team?
Our ultimate goal in the Market Solutions function is to create value internally with maximising premiums and differentiating our offerings. Externally, we seek to create innovative solutions for our customers. Therefore, it is important to continue our regular engagement with our customers to ensure we are helping meet the needs of brand owners based on market trends.
We are also seeking to respond to their challenges concerning consumer expectations, particularly in relation to regulations, increased functionality, sustainability, waste management, cost-effectiveness, and innovation.
What are the key sustainable issues you try to address for your business segment and market?
Sustainability has been in SABIC’s DNA since our inception. As a leading diversified global chemicals company, we have embedded the value of sustainability in the way we do business and in our daily operations. We recognise that our success increasingly depends on taking ambitious action on issues such as climate change on embracing the circular economy and on integrating environmental, social and governance (ESG) into every aspect of our business, and by doing so, we are helping our customers, the industry and the communities in which we operate.
As an example of this, we launched our TRUCIRCLE™ portfolio and services in 2019. It provides innovative solutions in addressing environmental challenges and driving more circularity. We seek to provide manufacturers with access to more sustainable materials. We consider this a considerable milestone on the journey toward closing the loop and creating a circular economy for plastics. Moreover, we see great evolvement and interest from the value chain players.
The transformative technologies have tremendous potential for solid-waste management, including the collection, sorting and mechanical or chemical recycling of plastics. Working with our customers to innovate circular products helps us solve some of the biggest sustainability has been in SABIC’s DNA since our inception.
We are committed to using more plastic waste as feedstock for our circular polymers to increase the uptake of recycled plastic from mechanical recycling. We are the first petrochemical company in the world to commit to scale up the advanced recycling of plastic waste back to the original polymer. By doing this, we are offering customers an important option for them to help meet ambitious recycling targets and address plastics end-of-use challenges more broadly.
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