Van t Veer
Business # 1998 Gothenburg
I have been asked to present you with an outline of the environmental aspects of plastic pipe systems today, but I intend to take the issue a little bit broader and talk about Health, Safety and Environment aspects. I will not present a facts & figures story on technical details, but I will try to give you a broader political and marketing picture, as far as this is possible in the time available. Also due to the limited time I have to restrict myself to items which require your attention, so please don't be alarmed when I concentrate on problem areas instead of the many positive aspects of plastic pipe systems.
Plastic pipe systems versus other materials
If industry, and especially our industry that works with "artificial" materials wants to keep its "licence to operate", we have to realise that society increasingly forces us from the traditional situation where there was general trust in what we were doing into distrust, where everything that we do will have to be explained and proven to be right. It seems that our colleagues from the so-called traditional material pipe systems have better understood this than we from the plastic pipe industry, as they seem to know everything which is negative about plastics, whereas we know far too little about the negative Health, Safety and Environment aspects of their products. This has brought us into a situation where we are mostly in the defensive, are mostly involved with damage control. If we want to change this and fight for our business, we have to become much more proactive, which requires knowledge of the facts, assistance in communication processes and experience as to who are our target groups and how can we reach them.
