Good morning. Today we're going to look at ICI's enviromental programmes and enviromental perfomance since 1990. I'd like to begin with some backgroud to ICI's enviromental projects. Then we'll go on to look at our Challenge 2000 project. And finally, we'll turn to the results of these programmes.

Now, the story really begins in the 1980s when people started becoming more concerned about enviromental issues. The first ICI enviromental project was a result of the realisation that, as a major player in the chemicals industry, ICI would have to address these growing public concerns. So, in 1990 we presented our shareholders with a programme to reduce the enviromental impact of our worldwide activities. Many of the steps we took back then have since become govermant lagislation. The project included some very ambitious targets for improving the company's enviromental performance. We realised that these goals demanded significant investment, so we commited the largest share of our annual 500 million safety, health and enviromental buget to the project. Since 1990 we've spent about 200 million each year on enviromental improvements. And then, in 1995, we assessed our performance and set ourselves equally demanding objectives for the next 5 years. These formed the basis of our Challenge 2000 project.

If you'd like to look at the screen, you'll see the four main objectives of Challenge 2000. As you can see, our first objective is to ensure that by the year 2000 all our businesses comply with the relevant enviromental regulations in each of the counties in which their products are sold. This applies to all our new and existing plants throughout the world. Our second objective is to improve energy efficiency. Now, here, we decided that by the year 2000 we would reduce our energy consumption by 10%. The starting point for this reduction would be the 1995 level. Moving on to the next objective, ICI intends to have the enviromental impact of its businesses by the year 2000. I'm sure you'll understand exactly how ambitious this is, but we feel it demonstrates the importance of the issue. To achive this target, we decide to concentrate on those wastes which pose the greatest threat to the enviroment and give their reduction the highest priority. And finally, our last objective is to insure that all our businesses have what we call Product Stewardship Programmes. These programmes are a tool for managing all our chemicals throughout their complete product life cycle. They'll provide up-to-date records of all the chemicals that we use and handle. And what's more, they'll ensure that all lables and public information are printed in the languages of our customers. The results of these programmes will be published each year in a special report.

Now, it's clear that growing public concern about the future of the enviroment will affect goverment thinking and no one in the industry doubts that tougher lagislation is to come. That's why challenge 2000 is such an essential part of ICI's strategic development. With the improvements we are making today, we can feel confident about filfulling the legal obligations tomorrow. At ICI we realise that we have a commitment not only to our customers, employees and shareholers, but also to the communities in which we work and produce our goods.

So now I'd like to turn to the results of the……