After 35 years of resilience and progress…

Five years later, we see the ripple effect of these challenges reflected in our activities (presented in this report), and our engaged membership remain our key strength. We have worked together to find solutions to the ongoing energy crisis and have been sharing these with all stakeholders for their input. We have continued raising awareness of our hydrogen, particularly important given recent regulatory developments. We have also collaborated to address safety issues related to safe loading and unloading of our products and are working to better understand where we use fluorinated materials so that we are ready for any action on PFAS. We are also rebuilding our Euro Chlor team with the excellent additions of Eili and Thomas after we said a sad farewell to Kristof and Ton in 2023 and 2024, respectively.

Despite this, there still remains more to do. Whilst we have made progress in some KPIs such as reducing our carbon footprint and Lost Time Injuries (LTIs) and seeing zero transport incidents, our process incidents and losses and capacity utilisation rate remain adversely affected meaning further action is needed. This underpins our continued vigilance and dedicated follow-up on all topics.

We can, and should, celebrate 35 years of Euro Chlor, grateful for the continued collaborative efforts of our members. I would also like to express my warmest and most sincere gratitude to the whole Halogens team for their continuous hard work and unequalled team spirit.

With all the above I truly believe that, for European chlor-alkali, the best is yet to come.

Marleen Pauwels

Euro Chlor Manager
Executive Director Halogens Industry Sector

… we stay ready to face the future

My past two years as Chair have coincided with turbulent times for Euro Chlor with reduced capacity utilisation, a difficult EU energy situation and a challenging regulatory framework.

Despite these hurdles, since our 30th anniversary, we have passed several milestones with the launch of our third Sustainability Programme that provides data to assist decision makers, and our Cost Competitiveness Study with Argus Media on the differences between regions. We have initiated several successful communications campaigns that highlight the benefits of our chemistry. We have also built on the Mid-Century Strategy (MCS), launched by one of my predecessors in 2020, and held a successful hydrogen event in early 2023 to prepare our industry for the future.

For this future though, we will need to build further on these key achievements. This includes further work on decreasing our environmental impact and to revert the trends seen in our safety performance as we journey towards an even safer, more sustainable and, ultimately, increasingly successful chlor-alkali industry for Europe. Our competitiveness also remains at stake, and we will continue to provide objective data to feed into the European decision-making processes to help here. We must trust the new European Commission to bring the highly needed European Industrial Deal to life, whilst remaining open to contributing where we can, using the strengths of our industry, to ensure EU objectives are met.

Whilst the economic and political situation remains as uncertain as ever, with our dedicated membership and diligent Euro Chlor team, I know we can succeed. I believe we are in a good position as I hand over the leadership to our new Chair, Daniel Koch, to initiate the next steps in our journey towards 2050 and beyond.

Johan Van Den Broeck (Vynova)