Why industrial transition stalls and how to move it forward

The chemicals and materials sector remains one of the essential foundations of the global economy, enabling industries from mobility and healthcare to construction and agriculture. It contributes an estimated $5.7 trillion to global GDP and supports around 120 million jobs worldwide.

Yet it operates under growing pressure, with high energy and feedstock costs, uneven demand across end markets, geopolitical fragmentation, and evolving regulation reshaping investment decisions and slowing growth. Forecasts suggest global chemical production will expand by just 1.5-2% annually in the coming years, well below historical levels.

At the same time, the sector remains one of the most emissions-intensive parts of the industrial system, responsible for roughly 2.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The challenge ahead is to build credible pathways that enable industry to remain competitive while shifting toward lower emissions and more circular systems.

The Global Impact Coalition was launched two years ago to tackle a problem that individual companies in the chemicals industry – or other hard-to-abate sectors – cannot solve alone. It began as a platform to bring together senior leaders across value chains around a shared set of challenges, and has since evolved into an independent, execution-focused organization. Today, GIC brings together companies with around $1 trillion in combined revenue, working on targeted projects to move from discussion to implementation.

Progress slows once new models have to operate across company boundaries, where coordination, incentives and execution become harder. Materials, risk and value do not move through the system in a coordinated way, and this is where progress tends to stall. GIC’s role is to make these constraints visible and to work with companies to address them directly, whether through specific projects, new forms of collaboration, or building the commercial foundations needed to take solutions to scale.

One of the areas GIC works in is the automotive value chain, where companies are trying to address a specific challenge: how to recover and reuse materials from end-of-life vehicles in a way that is commercially viable. A typical passenger vehicle contains between 200 and 250kg of plastic, yet less than 20% is recovered in a form that can be reused in high-quality applications.

GIC’s role has been to bring together the relevant actors across this value chain, from OEMs to recyclers to materials producers, and focus them on a clearly defined problem. The constraint lies in how the system works across company boundaries. Vehicles are not designed for disassembly. Plastics are mixed, contaminated or bonded with other materials. Sorting systems are not set up for automotive-specific streams. Even when material is recovered, inconsistent quality and unclear specifications limit reuse.

To make this tangible, the work has been grounded in real data. In one pilot, end-of-life vehicles were dismantled to track how materials actually move, recovering around eight tonnes of plastics and identifying where value is lost. This made it possible to focus on a small number of components that drive a disproportionate share of recoverable value, understand how early-stage contamination affects yield, and highlight how the absence of consistent specifications creates uncertainty for buyers.

What this does in practice is shift the discussion. Companies work from a shared view of where the system breaks down and what needs to change, whether in design, infrastructure or commercial terms, to make material recovery viable at scale.

Across this and other initiatives, the practical experience of getting companies to work together revealed a more nuanced reality than is often assumed:

Initial discussions framed broadly around “circularity” or “recycling” tended to stall. Progress only accelerated once the scope was narrowed to concrete questions: for example, which specific vehicle components are worth targeting, what polymer grades they contain, and what quality thresholds would be required for reuse. In the automotive sector, this meant moving away from whole-vehicle recycling ambitions toward a focused set of high-value parts where recovery could realistically improve. That shift reduced ambiguity and made it easier for companies to commit time and data.

There is often an assumption that companies are unwilling to share information. In practice, the issue is not willingness but relevance and trust. When data requests were too broad or perceived as one-directional, engagement dropped. When they were tightly defined and directly linked to a shared outcome – for example, mapping material losses in a dismantling process or comparing contamination levels across streams – companies participated more actively. The World Economic Forum's involvement in the early stages helped establish a neutral baseline, but maintaining that trust required continuous discipline in how information was used and shared.

Even when there is agreement on the problem, progress slows when it requires companies to adjust established practices. In the automotive case, improving recovery rates is not just a question of better sorting technology. It implies changes in vehicle design, dismantling standards, procurement specifications, and in some cases, the acceptance of different cost structures. These are decisions that sit across different functions within companies and often fall outside existing incentives. As a result, projects tend to move forward unevenly, with technical solutions advancing faster than the organizational changes required to implement them.

Taken together, these points highlight that working across value chains is less about convening the right actors and more about structuring the work in a way that makes participation practical and relevant, paving the way for implementation.