Professor Mark Everard is a Visiting Professor at Bournemouth University, as well as Associate Professor of Ecosystem Services at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol). He also works as a consultant, broadcaster and author. Mark is Vice-President of the Institution of Environmental Sciences (IES), a Fellow of the Linnaean Society, an Angling Trust Ambassador, and a science advisor to WildFish (formerly Salmon & Trout Conservation UK), Tiger Water (India), Wiltshire Wildlife Trust and a range of other bodies.

Mark has worked with the PVC sector since 1999, then as Director of Science with the international NGO The Natural Step (TNS), developing the 'five TNS Sustainability Challenges for PVC' that have since been embodied in revised form as the five key challenges of the VinylPlus voluntary commitment across the European PVC sector. Mark continues to work with the PVC sector and other businesses and policy areas, as well as serving in academia and broadcast media, to promote practical progress with society's greatest sustainability challenges.

Mark's work with PVC and other materials is part of a wider portfolio of systems and sustainable development research, advocacy and communication (including 40 books as over 130 peer-reviewed scientific papers as well as frequent magazine, TV and radio contributions) on natural resource management particularly in the developing, river and catchment management, and a range of other disciplines.

Foreword by Jonathon Porritt. Acknowledgement 1. Introduction 2. Living chemistry 3. Problematic chemistry and sustainable development 4. PVC: The good, the bad and the prejudiced 5. Voluntary sustainability commitments of the European PVC sector 6. A level playing field? 7. Sustainability and the purpose of business and regulation 8. Epilogue