It was entirely appropriate that UK business secretary Greg Clarke unveiled the UK government’s long-awaited White Paper on Industrial Strategy at the Francis Crick Institute in London at the end of November.
When singer/songwriter Paul Simon wrote ‘Fifty ways to leave your lover’, he would have had no idea that the European Chemical Industries Council (Cefic) would re-work it for its 2017 annual Chemical Congress in Vienna into ‘Fifty ways to leave the EU’.
The recent spate of devastating hurricanes that hit the Caribbean and the US, making the 2017 season one of the worst for many years, has refocused attention on the potential economic impact of global warming
Most of us should by now be aware of carbon footprinting, calculating the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere as a result of the activities of a particular individual, organisation, or community, and therefore focused on energy consumption and efficiency, but a new US footprinting approach has turned its attention to chemicals.
The global pharmaceutical industry is at a critical point, as Magid Abou-Gharbia, director of Temple University's Moulder Center for Drug Discovery Research, told delegates at CPhI/Informex, held in Philadelphia, US, in April 2017.
Solar power made up 25% of the UK's energy mix on the afternoon of 26 May 2017, a weekday, generating 8.7GW of power, more than coal and nuclear combined, and second only to gas-fired generation
Economic energy is a key factor in the success of the chemical industry, not just in the UK but around the world, whether it is derived from coal, natural gas or alternative to fossil fuels, like biomass, solar, wind or nuclear energy.
On both sides of the Atlantic, political concerns are uppermost in the minds of researchers and product developers, particularly those in the pharmaceutical sector. In the US, the concerns centre on cuts to the governmental funding of science, while in the UK, the focus is on Brexit and all that it entails - from the future of the European Medicines Centre in London to future EU Horizon research funding.
British chemical major ICI used to be regarded as a bellwether for the UK economy. If ICI was going well, this meant the UK economy was looking good. Germany’s BASF has been seen by many as a similar bellwether – if not entirely for the European economy, then certainly for the European chemical industry.