We have a diverse membership of companies in the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada, about 50 companies representing 75% of the value of shipments in the business of chemistry. To be a member of our association, they must commit to implementing Responsible Care, and that requires regular review of our products and processes as well as taking steps to reduce risk and improve societal benefit. It also involves a lot of work with communities and stakeholders to understand the risks and benefits of chemicals and chemical operations they may come in contact with.
I'll just share two examples with you to illustrate how we achieve significant reductions when we talk about Chemical Valley in Sarnia. We're here talking only to the federal government right now, but provincial governments play a very significant role, and the coordination amongst them is very important for everybody.
Let us go back, though, and look at two very important pollutants in the Sarnia area, VOCs and benzene. In 1998 we worked through the governments of Canada, Ontario, and other provinces to develop a memorandum of understanding, which, in the case of VOCs, suggested we would achieve a 25% reduction in emissions over five years. We more than exceeded that. In fact, we've had more than a 50% reduction in VOC emissions. Most of that came out of the Sarnia area.
We had very similar results with a memorandum of understanding on benzene emissions, in trying to reduce those in Chemical Valley and elsewhere in Canada. We had very impressive results, all validated by reports written by the government. That spirit of looking at a problem to see how we can solve it through multi-party stakeholder consultation and figuring out the best way to do it has disappeared. We're left only with the regulatory tool box. That causes us problems, but we work with that.
When you speak about greenhouse gases, some of the biggest changes came from product re-engineering and elimination. Different greenhouse gases don't have an equivalent impact on the environment. Some of them are 10,000 times or more what CO2 is. The reason we've achieved the 66% reduction is that those companies that made very high global-warming-potential gases took early action to understand that those are the products that have to leave first, just like what we're seeing today with the American and Canadian governments focusing on methane emission reductions. That's 23 times as powerful as a molecule of CO2. Product re-engineering and process re-engineering can eliminate some of those emissions.