PA Plastics SourceNet Symposium
Seetha Coleman-Kammula, PhD
Founder, Simply Sustain, LLC
Seetha Coleman-Kammula, retired senior vice president of Basell/ Shell, co-founded Simply Sustain, LLC with her husband Dr. Brian Coleman. Simply Sustain is a consulting firm based in Newark, Del., that guides companies to be profitable by doing business in ways that benefit both the environment and society. The mainstay of their approach is to convene companies in a plastics supply
PA Plastics SourceNet Symposium
Seetha Coleman-Kammula, PhD
Founder, Simply Sustain, LLC
Seetha Coleman-Kammula, retired senior vice president of Basell/ Shell, co-founded Simply Sustain, LLC with her husband Dr. Brian Coleman. Simply Sustain is a consulting firm based in Newark, Del., that guides companies to be profitable by doing business in ways that benefit both the environment and society. The mainstay of their approach is to convene companies in a plastics supply chain to help them see the whole system and their role in improving sustainability.
Dr. Coleman-Kammula serves on the Corporate Environmental Advisory Council of Dow Chemicals and is affiliated with the Sustainable Development Consortium at MIT, Society for Organizational Learning, which brings companies together to exchange experiences and stories of company’s change efforts. Dr. Coleman-Kammula is a board member at Developing Indigenous Resources – a non-profit organization that focuses on preventative health care.
Abstract
Innovation for Sustainable Growth
For many, sustainability is an issue of perceived risk, not of definitive proof. Are growth paths really threatening life-support systems? Will new and more efficient technologies not get us out of trouble? Choices must be made in the face of uncertainty both about the problem(s) and the effect of the interventions. Social and environmental protection will involve trade-offs against shareholder value. So why bother? While these dilemmas continue, consensus among business leaders is building, and though “collapse” is not proven, its possibility cannot be discounted. So what can plastics engineers do to improve sustainability?
In the context of sustainability, the three key choices that plastics engineers have to make in their day to day work are; which materials to use to lower environmental impact, how to reduce waste and litter to improve public acceptance of plastics and lower societal impact, and how to reduce costs to improve profits. In this presentation, Dr. Seetha Coleman-Kammula will present some tools and concepts which plastics engineers and businesses can use in research and development, product development, and marketing to innovate for sustainable growth.