2023 Sustainability Report

Message from the Leadership

Reliability is Value

Lirio A. Parisotto, by Liz Parisotto De Gregori.

At the end of every year, I use to draw up a sort of balance sheet, on a single piece of paper: the busy 2023 was no exception. It was, above all, a year rich in insights into what I see as the Company's greatest value. Before conclusions, the facts:

We kept our sales volumes intact against a backdrop of crushed margins, when the Brazilian chemical industry had to fight off imports of Asian resins at much lower prices, favored by Russian natural gas as an energy input.

This time, the petrochemical industry's expected international downturn was anabolized by a nefarious cocktail: war between Russia and Ukraine, sky-high Brazilian interest rates, world recession and a fall in the exchange rate.

If that was not enough, something else awaited us: the historic drought that brought the Amazon rivers to their lowest levels in 121 years. This made us mobilize, in Manaus, a daring logistical operation of naval pilotage, at very high costs, with ships traveling on a knife edge, bringing in inputs and finished products to mitigate impacts on our supply to the markets of bioriented polypropylene (BOPP), polystyrene (PS) and polypropylene (PP) reels and closure caps for mineral waters, juices and soft drinks.

In the petrochemical area, our investment in strategical positioning, north and south, in Manaus (Amazonas) and Triunfo (Rio Grande do Sul), assured supply of the polystyrene (PS) resin national demand.

At the same time as we were dealing with the drought in Manaus, north, our petrochemical plant in Triunfo, south, undertook the largest scheduled maintenance shutdown in the company's history. Before it, we doubled our tankage area to over 100,000 tons to guarantee customers full supply of styrene monomer (SM).

At the end of every year, I use to draw up a sort of balance sheet, on a single piece of paper: the busy 2023 was no exception. It was, above all, a year rich in insights into what I see as the Company's greatest value. Before conclusions, the facts:

We kept our sales volumes intact against a backdrop of crushed margins, when the Brazilian chemical industry had to fight off imports of Asian resins at much lower prices, favored by Russian natural gas as an energy input.

This time, the petrochemical industry's expected international downturn was anabolized by a nefarious cocktail: war between Russia and Ukraine, sky-high Brazilian interest rates, world recession and a fall in the exchange rate.

If that was not enough, something else awaited us: the historic drought that brought the Amazon rivers to their lowest levels in 121 years. This made us mobilize, in Manaus, a daring logistical operation of naval pilotage, at very high costs, with ships traveling on a knife edge, bringing in inputs and finished products to mitigate impacts on our supply to the markets of bioriented polypropylene (BOPP), polystyrene (PS) and polypropylene (PP) reels and closure caps for mineral waters, juices and soft drinks.

In the petrochemical area, our investment in strategical positioning, north and south, in Manaus (Amazonas) and Triunfo (Rio Grande do Sul), assured supply of the polystyrene (PS) resin national demand.

At the same time as we were dealing with the drought in Manaus, north, our petrochemical plant in Triunfo, south, undertook the largest scheduled maintenance shutdown in the company's history. Before it, we doubled our tankage area to over 100,000 tons to guarantee customers full supply of styrene monomer (SM).

The Triunfo petrochemical plant is today fully powered by biomass from plant waste used in our Steam and Power Generation Plant, replacing mineral oil and coal. This operation was improved in 2023, and we achieved an 84% reduction in the rate of greenhouse gas emissions compared to the 2018 baseline, and 63% use of renewable energy in the company's production processes.