— By Plasteurope.com correspondent — 

The European Union kickstarted its most strenuous efforts to date to address the challenges facing the region’s chemical sector, holding the first general assembly of the recently created Critical Chemicals Alliance (CCA) at the Chemelot Chemical Park in the Netherlands.

Founders of the CCA, which was launched in October last year on the back of the European Chemicals Industry Action Plan, said its aims to include tackling the potential for region-wide plant closures, supply disruptions, and what they call “the urgent need for investment in critical production capacities”.

Opened by the European Commission’s executive vice-president Stéphane Séjourné and attended by more than 140 delegates from across the sector and beyond, the general assembly – which was held earlier this month – discussed issues including investment, trade-policy protection, and the state of local chemicals production, a challenge which has vexed sector players for a number of years.

Last year, Ineos (London; www.ineos.com) accused the EU of “industrial self-harm”, blasting what it called “weak trade defences”, which it said had allowed a “tidal wave” of low-priced, high-carbon imports to roll into the single market, threatening thousands of manufacturing jobs, investment, and even the bloc’s sovereignty.

Related: EC presents Action Plan to address capacity closure risks

Earlier this month, Plastics Europe Polska called for the chemicals sector, including polymers, to be included in the EU’s Emissions Trading System’s (ETS) compensation list, the national support mechanism where EU member states use their EU ETS auctioning revenues to compensate energy-intensive industries for higher electricity costs and the risk of “carbon leakage”.

Speaking at the CCA assembly, Virginia Janssens, managing director of Plastics Europe, agreed with Séjourné’s call for the region to become circular and climate neutral without delay. “The time is now or never,” she added.

Janssens said her organisation had been selected as a member of the CCA’s steering board and would “play an active role, especially in formulating demand measures to improve the economics of circularity and which trade measures could help our chemical value chain”.

Marco Mensink, director-general of the European Chemical Industry Council (Cefic, Brussels; www.cefic.org), called the gathering a vital step towards safeguarding Europe’s chemical industry. With an “unprecedented rate of closures” across the EU chemical industry, structural reforms were urgently required, he said.

Mensink admitted that putting these changes in place would take time, but added, “Time is not neutral for an industry facing accelerating capacity losses and declining investment.”

The German chemical industry association VCI (Frankfurt; www.vci.de) said that what it called “the initial momentum and the spirit of a shared objective” at the gathering was “palpable”. But it warned that “important questions remained unanswered, such as those concerning the overall organisational structure and how the future results of the alliance can be translated into political action”.

Chemicals trade body France Chimie (www.francechimie.fr) said the creation of the CCA was sending a clear message that it was “time to move from shared observation [around the sector’s woes] to action”.

Meanwhile, Spanish chemicals association Feique (Madrid; www.feique.org) said the assembly underlined “the need to move from diagnosis [of the problems] to the implementation of concrete measures that have a real impact on companies…that allow for competitive production, resilient supply chains, and a solid industrial base capable of driving innovation and supporting the climate transition”.