In this episode of Five Lifes to Fifty, we sit down with Jenny Liu, Head of Sustainability for the Advanced Performance Materials business at Chemours. Jenny takes us inside the world of chemistry — not just as a science, but as a powerful enabler of sustainability, innovation, and everyday life. From electric vehicles to semiconductors and the hydrogen economy, we explore how advanced materials are quietly shaping the future, and how Chemours is leading the charge through bold sustainability goals and data-driven decision-making.

In this Episode 

Shelley:  I'm wondering if you could just tell us how you see it and tell us more about the advanced performance materials category that you work in. 

[00:59 ] Jenny: Thanks so much, Shelley. It's a great question. You know, Chemours is a global company and we provide trusted chemistry to make lives better and to, you know, really help communities thrive. 

[01:10 ] And I don't think that many people realize the role that chemistry plays in their everyday lives, our everyday lives. You know, more than 95% of all manufactured goods are touched by the business of chemistry. 

[01:24 ] So really, chemistry is essential for everything that we depend on in modern society. And I believe it's really essential for decarbonization as well. If you think about the computers that we're speaking into, your cell phones that you use for stay connected to the world, but all the semiconductors and advanced electronics that underlies that and enables that, 

[01:45 ] right? And then as again, as we head towards green economy, electric vehicles, batteries, hydrogen economy, you know, ultimately and you know, all the electrolyzers and fuel cells, so we make the membranes and the materials that underpins all of that and really brings that to life. 

[02:02 ] A little bit more about Chemours. You know, innovation really is at our core, so we're focused on how we can make our products and applications, how they can really enable sustainability, not only in terms of our own operations, but but also for our customers. 

[02:16 ] So we tend to have very high-performance materials that our customers use because they need them in the application, whether it's, you know, chemical resistant, temperature resistant for the electrical properties, inert. 

[02:26 ] So they'll use them to solve their problems, which are usually very high-performance application needs. But then also those are enabling things to make society better and to reduce environmental footprint. 

[02:38 ] So we have three businesses. We have a thermal solutions and refrigerant business so that's refrigerants, heat pumps, et cetera. We have our titanium dioxide pigments business. And so that's coatings and performance, coatings and materials and paints. 

[02:53 ] And then we have the advanced performance materials business for which I lead sustainability. You know, some of the brands you might know, you know, Teflon, Krytox, Nafion, these are high performance materials that go into critical medical applications, electronics, we talked about some of the consumer advanced electronics, clean energy, electric vehicle batteries. The hydrogen economy is a big growth area. And then a lot of areas of transportation. 

[03:18 ] So whether it's a safety feature on an airplane, for instance, or the space shuttle, or many, many valves and hoses and other sensor coatings and things that underpin automotive, you know, both a traditional combustion engine as well as a lot of materials in the EV space. Those are the types of materials that our products go into. 

[03:37 ] Shelley: Let's dive into the sustainability aspect of some of those products. So, I know from your experience you've been a product manager before, but right now your team intersects on the business side and on a daily basis maybe touches different areas including technology, R and D and product managers. 

[03:54 ] I also know that Chemours has some strong sustainability goals as well. Could you tell us about what is in place that makes sustainably successful right now for the products that you're delivering on? 

[04:05 ] Jenny: Absolutely. You know, sustainability really is kind of at the center of everything we do at Chemours from how we operate our facilities, how we innovate our products, and how we engage with our partners, our customers, stakeholders, colleagues and communities. 

[04:21 ] And so it's foundational to what we do and how we run our business. So we, as part of our corporate responsibility commitments, we announced 10 bold goals in 2018 under the pillars of environmental leadership, sustainable and innovative solutions, community impact, and the greatest place of work to all. And these are goals to be achieved by 2030. And we are well on track for almost all of these goals. 

[04:46 ] One of our goals around innovative and sustainable solutions was to ensure that 50% or more of our revenue comes from offerings that make a specific contribution to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. And I'll talk about that a little bit more. Our methodology and how we do that and what it means for our business and really excited we've achieved, you know, as of end of last year, 48%. So almost half of our revenue is coming from offerings that make that specific contribution to the UNSDGs. Another area is the area of environmental leadership and again, kind of driving all these product and application innovations while lowering our carbon footprint. 

[05:25 ] So on the climate front we committed to a 60% absolute reduction in scope 1 and scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions for operations by 2030 and to being kind of on a journey to being net zero by 2050. We also recently had our science based targets approved including a scope three goal. So that's upstream and downstream of Chemours to reduce our Scope 3 emissions by 25% per ton of production by 2030. 

[05:53 ] One other thing I want to mention because it connects to how we make our products. So and I think a very bold goal and innovative goal that we had given the space that we are in, right, in order to make our fluorinated chemistries responsibility, we have a very bold commitment to reduce our fluorinated organic chemical process emissions to air and water by 99% and more by 2030. We're the first and only company to make this commitment. And that's really important because it gets both at kind of a very material issue for us that is important for our privilege to operate, but it also helps us to decarbonize at the same time. And I think that's one of our more innovative and bold corporate responsibility goals. 

[06:36 ] Neil: Jenny, when most people think of end users, right? When I'm making a product, like you said, maybe I'm making a cell phone or I'm making a laptop and there's chemicals in there that are enablers of certain performance. You are the manufacturer of those chemicals. I think there is an easy case to be made. When I think of the carbon footprint or the environmental impact of my product, I want to make it more efficient, I want to dematerialize, I want to use better materials that have lower cradle to gate carbon impact or environment impact more generally. When you think of environmental impact of the products you make being an enabling chemical, you could affect the performance of downstream products significantly through dematerialization. 

[07:16 ] You need less of it. If you can have certain accelerants or certain catalysts or if you are lowering the temperature of operation for a particular product using certain chemical, if you extend the lifetime of particular product. How do you look at sustainability in these use cases? Because I can imagine this is incredibly difficult. And given that you say that you also have scope 3 targets of which downstream becomes quite a significant part of the environmental impact of the products you make. How do you go about doing this? How do you even think about this? 

[07:46 ] Jenny: That's a great question, Neil. And I'll give an example of how we put this kind of to use and then I'll talk about our sustainable offerings methodology that we call Evolve 2030 and how we put that to life in practice. 

[07:59 ] So one live example exactly of how again, not only are we addressing our own footprint, but we're really enabling through our customers and the value chain. Right? That's how we can really drive a lot of the sustainability improvements. Electrification of the transportation sector is projected to increase the demand for lithium ion batteries by five to 10 times in the next decade or so. To shorten the production times of EV batteries. All the major OEMs and battery manufacturers are looking at how do we do this? You know, by removing solvent from the process. So we were able to innovate using our Teflon PTFE fluoropolymers in the development of solvent free battery electrode manufacturing. 

[08:39 ] The physical footprint of these lines is 75% smaller. Just think about that. I mean a