Gulay Serhatkulu, Setting the Right Priorities for a Climate Neutral and Circular Future
SBN Detroit interviews Dr. Gulay Serhatkulu, BASF Senior Vice President of Performance Materials North America. This business encompasses the entire materials know-how of BASF regarding innovative, customized plastics under one roof and is globally active in four major industry sectors – transportation, construction, industrial applications, and consumer goods. Serhatkulu joined BASF in 2006 as a technical service representative. She has held a variety of roles with increasing responsibility within BASF including product management, marketing, sales, strategy, and most recently procurement. Before BASF, she earned two postdoctoral appointments at the University of Nottingham, UK, and Wayne State University, respectively. Serhatkulu shares with us some insights on the projects, goals, and challenges she leads every day. Q: What is involved in your role in leading the sustainability team at BASF in the North American region? A: Plastics do have proven benefits during their use phase – for example, preservation of food loss, lightweight construction of vehicles, and building insulation. Plastic waste, however, and in particular plastic waste in the context of marine littering, is perceived as a major global challenge. There is also increasing regulatory pressure regarding recycling quota and recyclability on the one hand and strong commitments of our customers towards increasing the share of recycled material in their offerings on the other hand. Solving these challenges requires innovation and joint efforts globally across the value chain. A team across BASF has taken up this challenge and developed the ChemCycling™ project which focuses specifically on transforming plastic waste into a raw material using pyrolysis, a thermochemical process. The raw material can be fed into the existing assets to create new chemical products with excellent product performance based on recycled plastic waste. Besides ChemCycling, BASF offers other mass-balanced chemical or advanced recycling solutions based on different post-consumer and post-industrial feedstocks. In this case, the recycled feedstock is not a pyrolysis oil and is introduced as an intermediate during the manufacturing process and not at the very beginning as is the case of pyrolysis oil. Chemical recycling represents an exciting business opportunity for us and our customers, as the resulting products are of equal quality to the products derived from fossil feedstock. Nevertheless, many technical, economic, and regulatory questions have to be answered but we are eager to work on it and optimistic that we can cope with all challenges. Q: What are you currently working on in terms of sustainability for BASF? A: One great example is the BASF and Steelcase collaboration on the brand’s new Flex Perch Stool, which has sustainability and circularity at the forefront of its design. This is the first furniture product for Steelcase that uses plastics derived from a chemical or advanced recycling process. The stool is made with BASF’s Ultramid® B3EG6 Ccycled™, an injection moldable polyamide (nylon) 6 that utilizes material from a waste stream generated during electronics production and is a one-for-one replacement for the 100% fossil-derived plastics. I cannot stress enough the importance of value chain partnership to achieve these types of major breakthroughs. From a lightweight perspective, I can also point to a collaboration with Toyota on their Sienna. We also work with footwear companies to provide plastic and foam materials that have sustainability benefits such as being bio-based and recyclable. The new Sienna generation first-of-its-kind third-row free-standing seat backs. We also have efforts for Climate protection. Climate change and global warming are among the most pressing challenges of our time. On our journey toward climate neutrality, we have set ourselves ambitious goals and are striving worldwide to achieve net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050. At the heart of the long-term transition toward net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050 is the use of new technologies, which will replace fossil fuels such as natural gas with electricity from renewable sources. Additionally, we engage our suppliers in our ambition to serve our customers with the lowest carbon footprint materials possible. In our Supplier CO2 Management Program, we first aim to achieve transparency on the product-related CO2 emissions of our purchased raw materials. In this phase, we offer our support and share our knowledge on Product Carbon Footprint valuation methodologies and tools with our suppliers. Q: What are your longer-term goals there? A: We want to live up to our purpose: We create chemistry for a sustainable future. We are only successful if our products, solutions, and technologies add value to society. Therefore, we want to make a positive impact on society and safeguard our planet. To drive the sustainability transformation, we focus on three key topics: Climate change, Circular Economy, and a safe and sustainable portfolio. We are striving worldwide to achieve net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050. Q: What are the challenges you face? A: I see two main challenges. First, new technologies like electrically heated crackers, electric steam generation, carbon capture, and storage technologies need to be developed to achieve our targets. Some of these will take time to develop and they will first need to be piloted before being scaled up. Second, we need a supportive and enabling regulatory framework if the transformation is to succeed. Q: From your perspective, what role does BASF as a business play in terms of sustainability for the surrounding community? A: We measure the overall impact of economic, environmental, and social aspects of our business activities with our Value to Society methodology. We take sustainable use of water and preserving biodiversity seriously. Our global target is to implement sustainable water management at all production sites in water stress areas and our connected sites by 2030. We periodically investigate our production sites around the world to revise which are located near internationally protected areas. We connect with external stakeholders and networks to discuss our sustainability strategy. One local example is Fighting Island. Owned by BASF, Fighting Island is a 1,500-acre island on the Canadian side of the Detroit River in LaSalle, Ontario. The island was historically used for storage of lime tailings, a byproduct of soda ash production, in settling beds. Since closing the settling beds in 1982, BASF’s efforts have led to native revegetation and reforestation to help prevent erosion, reduce dust, increase wildlife habitat, control runoff, and enhance
Kerry C. Duggan Works With Game-Changing Sustainability Businesses in Detroit
SBND interviews Kerry C. Duggan,national political advisor and visionary climatech executive and former Obama White House official. Founder and CEO of SustainabiliD in Detroit, and recently named the founding director of the University of Michigan’s SEAS Sustainability Clinic, Duggan shares her thoughts on a local level, highlighting key women and businesses who are making an impact and offering advice on approaching sustainability. Duggan is a board director of Perma-Fix (NASDAQ: PESI) and a senior advisor at RockCreek. She also sits on several corporate advisory boards, including Our Next Energy (ONE), Lux-Wall, Aclima, Walker-Miller, Arctaris Impact Investors, BlueConduit, and Commonweal Ventures. She is a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists and a member of the International Women’s Forum. Duggan’s current public service includes serving as an appointee to the (U.S.) Secretary of Energy’s Advisory Board (SEAB) under Secretary Jennifer Granholm and to the State of Michigan’s Council on Climate Solutions under Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Q: Kerry, please tell us about your current work. A: I started SustainabiliD five years ago. It is a woman-owned,service-disabled veteran-owned, Detroit-based diverse small business working with game-changers to equitably solve the climate crisis.So, I have no small mission statement. As such, I’ve spent the last five years working on climate solutions in two ways: On the institutional side, I’m working to help develop the business model around place-based work for larger organizations. I have been appointed as the founding director of UM’s SEAS sustainability clinic in Detroit, and we are currently focused on three goals: To seek equitable and just solutions to the city’s most pressing sustainability-related issues; to lower operating costs—particularly in energy management for city operations—while reducing carbon emissions; and to support the delivery of services directly to the city and, through partner programs, to improve residents’ quality of life. Second, I work with climate solution companies. These are the game-changers. For example, Our Next Energy (ONE) recently set a world record of EV miles traveled on a single charge: 752 miles, in December, in Michigan. This is a very big deal. I work to help these businesses navigate opportunities to scale with the speed that we all need to combat the climate crisis. Q: Your work is largely around energy, climate, and environment.Where does your passion in these areas come from? A: First, I’m a mom. Climate is the most urgent issue of our time, and I want to create a safer, more sustainable planet for the next generation. Second, I have always loved doing my work in Detroit. My ancestors immigrated to Detroit from Ireland, so from a generational perspective, I try to give back to the place that has given my family so much. In this way, I’m very grounded in Detroit. I was also blessed to spend many summers of my youth on the shores of the Great Lakes, home to 21% of the world’s fresh surface water. How lucky are we? I work to protect that and make it available for my kids. Lastly, I have a basketball background, and the skills I gleaned from playing high-level hoops have transferred to my work. I’ll give an example. There is a move in basketball called the ‘give-and-go move’ where you give the ball away, then cut to the net, and get the ball back to make the lay-up. In my work, I listen to the needs of leaders in communities, putting aside my point of view, because if I don’t listen to real and immediate needs, we are just talking past one another – and no one wins. I put the give-and-go into practice in this way a lot. Q: What is your vision behind SustainabiliD? A: I grew up in a suburb of Detroit. Kids twenty miles down the road living in the city of Detroit faced injustices that I did notand conversely did not have the opportunities I had. That’s been my charge: how can we change this and ensure the city is not only vibrant and safe but also offers equitable opportunities to everyone? Q: The SustainabiliD team is predominantly women. What are your thoughts on women as leaders in sustainability? A: I think if I created a pie chart of my calendar, we’d see that daily I’m mostly speaking with female leaders across the globe, who are mostly non-white. These are the voices that have been left furthest behind in every conversation to date on the planet. I know I don’t have all the answers, but I always try to listen to people of color, women, other minorities, and people with underrepresented identities on what their needs are and try to help them position themselves to win the future. That’s where I’ve chosen to spend my time. Q: Speaking of women, what Detroit female business leaders in the sustainability space can you point to who are making a difference? A: Carla Walker-Miller. I work with a variety of companies but one that is an absolute stand-out is Walker-Miller Energy Services. In addition to what they do, which is to help relieve folks of energy burden by doing energy retrofits, Carla is an equitable economic development leader and a woman of color. I admire her not only for her company’s work but for her leadership. She is a national figure living and working in Detroit making a great impact on equitable economic development. Her work constantly informs what I’m doing now. Carla Walker-Miller has hired Dr. Brandy Brown as Chief Innovation Officer for Walker-Miller. She is another amazing talent. Before joining Walker-Miller, Dr. Brown served as Climate & Energy Advisor within the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes & Energy. She also serves as part of the Environmental Justice faculty for the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability and as an appointee to Michigan’s National Resources Trust Fund Board. A native Detroiter, Dr. Jalonne L. White-Newsome was recently tapped to be the new White House Council on Environmental Quality’s Senior Director for Environmental Justice. She has tackled environmental challenges from a wide range
