From solvents to services: restructuring chemical supplier relationships to achieve environmental excellence

Redefining how chemicals are sold and used is an emerging trend in the manufacturing sector. This shift entails a fundamental restructuring of supplier-customer transactions from a volume and sales orientation to a service orientation. This restructured relationship between chemical suppliers and their customers has yielded reduced costs, improved quality, and streamlined chemical handling. With the right set of incentives, the service-based contracting can also enhance environmental performance through pollution prevention. The Chemical Strategies Partnership is working with electronics manufacturing companies to adapt this new supplier-customer model to the electronics industry to improve environmental performance while reducing costs and increasing efficiency