Tomorrow’s Economic Supercycle: Only If We Build A lot More Toilets

By John Richardson

AFTER my presentation yesterday during the 4^th ICIS Asian Polyolefins Conference in Bangkok, someone asked me a very good question: “Where is the next Economic Supercycle going to come from?”

My answer was as follows:

1. Quite possibly from the developing world.
2. But countries that have more mobile phones than toilets will only be able to cash-in on their potential demographic dividends of youthful populations if basic needs such as sanitation are met.
3. These basic needs also include adequate food, potable water, infrastructure, healthcare and education.
4. If you are too sick to even attend school (assuming there is a decent school available) because you don’t have decent sanitation or food etc. then of course it doesn’t matter how old you are. Your youth will not be an advantage because you won’t be healthy enough to join the workforce and so  help replace the demand being lost from all the Babyboomers who are retiring in the West.

We have to be realistic about timeframes. Assuming that the money and innovation are available to bridge the big gaps in basic needs, then it is still going to take many years to bridge these gaps.

But we are not making enough progress towards bridging these gaps. Take sanitation as an example and this Guardian newspaper report on a newly-released study by the charity, WaterAid:

Close to one in five people living in towns, cities and megacities across the world do not have access to a safe, basic toilet.

Some 600 million urban dwellers globally rely on a humiliating and haphazard array of the only services available to them in slums: filthy and crowded communal toilets, or rudimentary pit or bucket latrines that fail to meet minimum standards of hygiene, safety or privacy. A further 100 million people in cities do not even have access to these services and are forced to defecate in the open, using railway tracks, roadsides and even plastic bags dubbed “flying toilets”, the report found.

This is an enormous opportunity for the chemicals industry to create its own demand by providing say all the polyvinyl chloride pipes needed to bring sanitation to  many of these 600 million urban dwellers at prices that can be aff0rded.

And this must also be done sustainably as environmental pressures are increasing.

First of all, though, people have to accept that yesterday’s Economic Supercycle is over good and because it is over, we face a vastly more complex world. Those who cling on to the old notions of success in this industry will, I am afraid, end up losing out.