What is a hot commodity

Words by Sachini, 22 ACT

“Jamie said you were a Brownie,” said my friend Katie.

I remember looking down at my arms, feeling a stab of defensiveness shoot through my stomach.

“I don’t care,” I had said.

In that moment, 8-years-old, with my pink Big-W backpack – I really didn’t care. I was hurt because someone had called me a name, but I did not understand the years of loaded history behind the comment. I did not understand why it was bad, in someone’s eyes, to have brown skin.

This marked the first time I had thought about my skin as more than just a part of me. The first time it had clicked that I was different.

My parents are Sri Lankan, they immigrated to Newman in the 70s and moved down to Perth soon after. I grew up in the suburbs and as far as I was concerned, I was an Aussie girl with brown skin.

But my relationship with brown-ness only grew more complicated as I got older.

As a pre-teen, I’d thought white people were beautiful. I watched pale girls win Dolly magazine’s yearly model search. I idolised Delta Goodrem and Emma Watson. So it was not a stretch for me to connect the dots when the boy I had a crush on, passed me up for my (caucasian) best friend. The feeling of inadequacy could easily be attributed to the lack of ethnic diversity I was seeing in media and books. My idea of ‘desirable’ had become warped and twisted to contain only what was shown to me – whiteness.

In 2002, culturally diverse actors born overseas landed only 3% of roles on Australian screens, despite making up 14% of the population according to the report, Broadcast in Colour.

This statistic is now 20 years old, and although it has been updated, it aligns with my childhood and accurately reflects my exposure to the amount of culturally diverse people I was exposed to in the media. Additionally, the coloured characters that I was seeing and reading about were not looked at by others as beautiful. They were often framed as intelligent, but they were not considered desirable. Once I understood this, my own frustration that I was also apparently ‘not beautiful’ was not surprising given it had been fed to me by the media all my life.

As a teenager, I grew out of this mindset and into myself.

I met real people, people of colour, who were every bit as beautiful and successful as I wanted to be. I wrote my own stories where the protagonist kicked arse, while being brown and desirable. I started to own my skin because it seemed that someone had to.

Now I am suddenly living in a society where my brown skin has become a trendy accessory. My university takes pictures of me to appeal to their global market; I stare at boxes in job applications that ask me to self-identify as culturally diverse.

I am a hot commodity.

While my cursor hovers over this box I feel strange. Is it okay for me to take advantage of my skin-colour when I consider it just a part of me? Yes, my brownness has influenced my lived experience, but it hasn’t affected my intelligence, communication skills or ability to work. I think about what it means to be a ‘diversity hire.’

You see, I am not just the daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants. I am a person who was raised by a woman conscious of what Australian society values. A woman who moved to a mining town in her late teenage years with English barely in her vocabulary. She saw the challenges of assimilating into Australian culture before I had to and she raised me with the ability to fit in.

Along with pushing my brother and I to excel academically, my mother enrolled us in speech, drama and music lessons. She relented – after a little persuasion – to letting us have part-time jobs during school. She kept us socialised and well-spoken because she knew we were growing up in a society that would value that.

I am not just a second-generation Sri Lankan immigrant; I am a brown person raised to have the qualities that Australian universities and businesses value. Now that we, as a society, are making steps to reclaim diversity, it feels wrong to rely on my Sri Lankan identity for privilege when I am so distanced from it.

From the outside I am brown. A child of immigrants, an outsider. From the inside I am a girl, a mish-mashed amalgamation of Australia and Sri Lanka. And I am stuck between knowing that people like myself have not been valued in the past; to now being exoticised because of my skin, and not feeling like I deserve it.

My relationship with my skin is nuanced. It is complicated. But I have evolved so much since that day when I was labelled ‘a Brownie’. Now I am changing my answer. To that kid from school, Jamie, I say, I do care that I am a ‘Brownie’.  How can I not? It is a part of me. And no matter how many times the world around me changes its mind, I will always respect it. It is not just the colour of my skin. It is my heritage, my uniqueness and my beauty.

Illustration by Aileen, You can find more of her work on Instagram @aileenetc

U.S. chemical and plastic exports should expect boost from shale gas.    By Chris Dupin       The boom in U.S. natural gas production is expected to help boost exports and reduce imports of chemicals and plastics, according to chemical industry analysts and logistics services providers.    “Between shale gas recovery technologies and conventional natural gas reserves, there is great potential for a 21st century renaissance in U.S.-based manufacturing and exports in particular,” said Richard Bolte, president and chief executive officer of BDP International, a Philadelphia-based logistics firm that has long been a leader in serving the chemical industry.    “A growing number of multinational chemical companies, for example, are building new plant capacity here because natural gas is a key feedstock for production,” Bolte explained. “Just as importantly, the U.S. already enjoys superior transportation/logistics infrastructure, supply chain security and a world-class workforce. All of that adds up to a smart investment in industrial development and hedge on chemical sourcing in less stable regions.”     “Clearly the shale development is having a tremendous influence on the future of U.S. petrochemicals,” said John Stekla, director of ethylene studies at IHS Chemicals, a research and publishing firm. “Five years ago when I would talk about the ethylene business I was talking an obituary for North American petrochemicals. Today, it’s birth announcement after birth announcement.”    Ethylene is a basic chemical, the first step in manufacturing a wide array of chemicals, plastics, and fibers.    “Based on industry reports, we estimate that the U.S. chemicals industry has invested $15 billion in ethylene production, increasing capacity by 33 percent,” said Garrett Gee, director of chemical advisory services at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).    In a report issued last year, the American Chemistry Council (ACC) said “because the price of ethane is low relative to oil-based feedstocks used in other parts of the world, U.S.-based chemical manufacturers are contributing to strong exports of petrochemical derivatives and plastics.” The trade group claimed that “thanks in large part to shale gas, chemical exports at the Port of New Orleans jumped 34 percent last year.”    Speaking at an event in October, Cal Dooley, the ACC’s president and CEO, said “with global oil prices hovering around $100 a barrel, and U.S. prices on natural gas prices under $4 per million BTU, America’s chemical industry is now in its strongest competitive position for the first time in years.”     As an example, PwC calculated the potential selling price of high density polyethylene — a ubiquitous plastic used in making everything from food containers to pipe — would be $542 per ton, assuming a 3 percent margin, if natural gas can be purchased at $3 per million BTU. That compares to $1,304 per ton, if gas was selling at its historical price of about $12.50 and cheaper than the $713 a ton it would cost to make it in Saudi Arabia or $2,079 in Asia because of higher cost methods of producing ethylene in those regions (with an ethane-butane mixture in Saudi Arabia and from petroleum in Asia).    Dooley noted that the affect of shale gas is likely to be very broad as “many industries, including auto manufacturing, agriculture, health care and technology rely on chemistry and plastics.”    Though the timing is not entirely clear, Stekla said there are projects that will increase ethylene capacity by 30 percent through 2018-19. Most of the plants will be located near the Gulf of Mexico.    “These are huge investments,” he said. “All of that is based on the low-cost feedstock position. What has happened is that the development of the shale has created an ethane advantage which is the primary feedstock for making ethylene and so that gives the producers a very low-cost position to export.”    That would represent a big change from the past, Stekla said.    “Historically when you build a plant here in the U.S. it would be 80 to 90 percent targeted for the domestic market and you would try to export a little bit of incremental excess production and try not to lose too much money on it,” he explained. “But because of our mature market for these new products, the primary target market will be exports. We will see a very large increase in the export of ethylene-based petrochemicals like polyethylene plastics, PVC, ethylene glycol, and products like that.”    Natural gas is either “wet” or “dry.” Dry gas is almost all methane, while wet gas has greater amounts of heavier molecules, such as ethane, propane, and butane, which have higher heat contents and are removed from natural gas.    Stekla said ethane is generally the only chemical feedstock that is not globally traded, because it is generally too expensive to ship, although it is moved by pipeline and new pipelines are being constructed to move ethane within the United States.    However, the chemical company Ineos announced earlier this year that it had signed a 15-year deal to import ethane from Marcus Hook, Pa., and for use as a feedstock in its European plants.    But Stekla says generally, instead of being exported, ethane and many other “natural gas liquids,” such as propane and butane, will likely be used to manufacture other chemicals and plastics, he said.    Some of these chemicals will also be shipped in tankers or parcel tankers, while others will be made into products such as plastic pellets that can be shipped in dry containers   

In a speech reported by the trade magazine Chemical Week, Andrew Liveris, chief executive officer of Dow Chemical, said while natural gas can be liquefied and sold at a profit, “if we turn it into high-value products, we can export those at much higher profit, one that is felt throughout the economy. 

Lower manufacturing costs can reduce the prices of those chemicals or potentially increase profit margins, creating a window for new U.S. manufacturing companies to enter markets or provide “an advantage for U.S. companies to compete against imported chemical products from low-labor markets such as China and India,” he said.