Kickstart: Chemours focuses on moving past fiscal scandal with new CEO

Denise Dignam may have been thrust into the CEO spot at Chemours Co. unexpectedly as an interim leader when its former CEO was involved with an audit scandal, but she's now taking full control of the post.

Dignam was named new CEO of Chemours on March 25, just a few weeks after being tapped to serve as interim CEO when the Chemours board placed three senior executives — President and CEO Mark Newman, Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President Jonathan Lock, and Vice President, Controller and Principal Accounting Officer Camela Wisel — on administrative leave.

On March 6, the Wilmington, Del.-based company said its audit committee had discovered a "lack of transparency" in financial documents, saying the three executives manipulated financial payments by either speeding up or slowing down payments to improve their financial incentives.

"[Dignam] has the full support of the board, and we are pleased to have an experienced and capable executive who is so highly regarded inside and outside Chemours," Chairwoman Dawn Farrell said in a news release.

Dignam, a 35-year veteran of the chemical industry and the former president of its titanium technologies segment and its advance performance materials, noted she was "committed to continuing to lead with transparency."

There's been a lot going on in Ukraine since the Russian invasion two years ago, but in some areas of the country, life is getting back to normal. Normal may include a stop for a fast food burger. And normality, McDonald's Ukraine says, should also include more sustainable operations.

Beatriz Santos from our sister paper Sustainable Plastics writes that McDonald's restaurants in Ukraine are replacing plastic cutlery with wooden ones made from birch. They also have stopped providing plastic drink covers for cold drinks served for in-house consumption. (They are still available for hot beverages and takeout containers.)

McDonald's has been cutting its single-use plastics consumption throughout Europe, in part due to regional restrictions.

McDonald's had closed all of its restaurants in Ukraine in February 2022 with the Russian invasion. It reopened a Kiev location later that year and has slowly reopened other sites across the country, Beatriz writes. However, "establishments have resumed operations amid expanded security rules that allow restaurant staff to shut the stores to get to the shelter in the event of an air alert."

There's a lot of other things going on in the world affecting the plastics industry in North America of course. This week, Plastics News has two events to help you sort through it.

Today, March 26, at 2 p.m., PN Economics Editor Bill Wood will talk about interest rates, unemployment, policy and other financial details during Numbers That Matter Live.

On Thursday, March 28, at 2 p.m., senior reporter Frank Esposito will sit down with Editor Don Loepp to provide some details about material availability and pricing in Polymer Points Live. You can get a preview of the topic from this week's Material Insights video.

Both Numbers That Matter Live and Polymer Points Live are available for PN subscribers.