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This chapter positions the search for sustainability in the chemical industry and its surroundings in a transition context. We frame efforts to develop alternative technologies, processes, and products based on renewable resources and efficient use of (renewable) energy as part of a longer term process in which the dominant culture, structure, and practices in the chemical industry are reinvented. We distinguish between different emerging pathways that increasingly start to compete; on the one hand, efforts to improve the performance of the existing systems (or regimes) through efficiency increases and replacement of fossil by bio-based resources and, on the other, attempts to move to fundamentally different types of chemical industry based on second-and third-generation biomass technologies. From a transition perspective, we seek to understand the dynamics in and between these pathways to develop thoughts on …