The promise of convenience and consumerism embedded in the late-1940s petrochemical industry boom shrouded an inconvenient truth. The products the chemical industry marketed as miracle, low-cost solutions for harried housewives—“long-wearing” nylons, self-service meats in sanitary cellophane, easy-flow paints—are made from climate-polluting fossil fuels and chock full of hazardous chemicals.
A longstanding failure to recognize the connections between climate and chemical pollution, a team of scientists and policy experts argue in a new peer-reviewed commentary in the journal Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, threatens to destroy the conditions that support life on Earth.
Fossil fuel-derived chemicals permeate a dizzying array of consumer, agricultural and industrial products. Many of these chemicals contribute to a range of chronic diseases, including cancer, metabolic disorders like diabetes and obesity, and diverse reproductive and neurological problems, research shows. Their manufacture, use and disposal has contaminated the air, water and soil around the world, creating a global crisis on par with the climate and biodiversity crisis, the authors argue.
Discussions around climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions tend to focus on the oil and gas used for power and transportation, and the need to transition to different sources of energy, said Xenia Trier, a coauthor on the paper and an associate professor of environmental analytical chemistry at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
“What we have talked less about is the oil and gas that goes into making the chemicals and materials that surround us,” she said.
Trier and her colleagues knew they had to jumpstart that discussion when they saw that fossil fuel industry forecasts didn’t predict decreases in production, because they were shifting from selling oil for energy and transportation to selling it for expanded production of chemicals and plastics.
“As we try to lessen our dependence on oil and gas as an energy source, the oil and gas industry is turning to material production to replace the demand drying up from oil and gas as an energy source,” said Gretta Goldenman, a study coauthor, expert on international chemical regulation and founder of Milieu Law & Policy Consulting.
The oil and gas industry’s scenario for growth is making more plastics and more chemicals, Goldenman said. “So how do you stop that? How do you turn that around? That’s the question we’re asking.”
Petrochemicals are expected to account for more than a third of the growth in global oil demand, according to the International Energy Agency, driven largely by the demand for plastics. Plastic production has increased “almost exponentially” and is projected to triple by 2060, according to a 2023 report by the Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health, an international group of scientists, health care workers and policy analysts.
Plastics harm health and the environment at every stage of their life cycle, the report warned, “from extraction of the coal, oil, and gas that are its main feedstocks through to ultimate disposal into the environment.”
These harms incur staggering costs, the authors calculated, exceeding $920 billion in U.S. health costs of disease and disability from exposure to hazardous chemicals in 2015 alone, and costing more than $340 billion a year in damages associated with greenhouse gas emissions. Plastics and other petroleum products are deceptively cheap, they said, because companies pass on these health and environmental harms to citizens, taxpayers and governments in countries around the world without compensation.
Petrochemical manufacturing is already the world’s largest industrial energy consumer and the third-largest source of carbon dioxide emissions, according to the International Energy Agency.
Climate-mitigation strategies must address the strong connections between the oil and gas components that are driving climate change and those that are causing chemical pollution together, the authors warned. Otherwise, they’re not accounting for the massive energy inputs required for chemical production, the need to continue extracting oil and gas as raw materials or the resulting climate and chemical pollution.
But strategies to transition away from fossil fuels for energy and materials must recognize the environmental costs of simply shifting to bio-based feedstocks, said Trier. “Then we would need a lot of land, so it’s actually a regrettable substitution, because it takes away the capacity of land to support nature and food and clean water. Plus it would use a lot of water and pesticides to grow the crops.”
That’s why climate-mitigation strategies to limit the extraction and burning of fossil fuels must take a comprehensive approach that recognizes the intricate connections between chemical pollution, climate change and biodiversity loss, all fueled by a consumer society based on misguided notions of unlimited growth, Trier and her colleagues said.
“Unless we reduce the amount of materials and chemicals we produce and consume, we will end up with some kind of environmental impact,” Trier said.
“This is a very important scientific analysis which reminds us all of the strong links between climate change, chemical production and biodiversity,” said Judith Enck, former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator and president of the environmental group Beyond Plastics, who was not involved in the paper.
Public policies should not have unintended consequences, said Enck. “We need a shift away from fossil fuels and its toxic cousin, chemical production. Given the scope of the climate crisis and the damage done by petrochemical production, this is the time to invest in truly sustainable solutions to all of these problems.”
The American Petroleum Institute did not respond to a request for comment.
On Monday, the Trump administration ordered an end to government purchases of paper straws to counter the “irrational campaign against plastic straws,” noting that paper straws are more expensive to produce than plastic. The order did not mention the billions of dollars the plastics industry passes on to consumers to keep prices artificially low.
“Straws are just the beginning,” said Matt Seaholm, president and CEO of the Plastics Industry Association, in a statement responding to the executive order. “We know that plastic is the best material for nearly everything it is used for, while being sustainable.”
Roughly 9 percent of plastics get recycled globally, scientists estimate.
A “Parasite Killing Its Host”
Nearly all the roughly 350,000 synthetic chemicals on the market are derived from oil and gas. These chemicals are in tens of thousands of everyday consumer and industrial products, including aspirin, vinyl flooring, balloons, heart valves, pesticides, plastics, sunglasses and underwear.
Petrochemicals are even used to make the materials and technologies that are supposed to drive the transition away from fossil fuels, such as solar panels, electric vehicles and wind turbine blades.
When these materials are incinerated as trash, a common method of garbage disposal in Europe, they release greenhouse gases.
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And some feedstocks and industrial chemicals are themselves potent greenhouse gases, including methane, a main component of natural gas, and PFAS “forever chemicals.”
When they make fluoropolymers, a subset of PFAS, Trier explained, “they use extremely volatile, potent greenhouse gases as feedstock chemicals, which are very hard to synthesize without some losses.”
Researchers calculated in a 2019 study that the global plastics industry released an estimated 1.7 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalents in 2015. The nonprofit environmental group Toxic-Free Future reported in 2021 that a U.S. manufacturer of fluorinated polymers released more than 240,000 pounds of a feedstock chemical (HCFC-22) that’s not just a potent greenhouse gas but also depletes the atmosphere’s ozone layer.
It’s incredibly important to have an accessible narrative that connects the dots between the energy transition, the role chemicals play and why the chemical industry must also transition, said environmental toxicologist Jane Muncke, managing director and chief scientific officer of the Switzerland-based nonprofit Food Packaging Forum, who was not involved in the study.
Perhaps an even more important point raised in the paper, Muncke said, is the problem of consumerism and an “out of control” economic system that constantly needs to grow.
“We have an economic system that puts short-term profit maximization above everything else,” said Muncke, who focuses on preventing chronic disease caused by exposure to harmful chemicals. “All the data on plastics, on carbon dioxide emissions, biodiversity loss, and so on, all boils down to the fact that we are overexploiting our natural resources. We’re basically the parasite that’s killing its host.”
Rethinking Unlimited Growth and the Throwaway Mindset
To avoid that scenario, the authors propose a comprehensive strategy that transforms the way chemicals and materials are produced, used and managed. That means recognizing the economic costs of unsustainable practices that harm health and the environment, restricting potentially harmful raw materials to only essential uses and switching to chemicals, materials and products that are safe and sustainable by design.
“We are undermining a limited base of resources, and this is not going to be sustainable in the long run,” said Goldenman.
“We have to start thinking more about circularity,” she said, referring to approaches that reduce consumption, extraction, pollution and waste. “And how to make the shift so that these resources that are limited are used for the most important purposes, not squandered or leading to pollution for uses that aren’t important.”
“The root of all of our problems that we have as humanity right now is overconsumption.”
— Jane Muncke, Food Packaging Forum
A good start is asking whether any chemical or material is necessary, the authors recommend. And they should not persist in the environment, accumulate in people or wildlife, cause harm or damage the climate or ozone layer.
Products designed for environmental sustainability are durable and repairable rather than simply tossed after each use like the products that proliferated after the Second World War to cater to a burgeoning throwaway society.
Ultimately, the authors argue, societies must reduce dependency on oil and gas as the primary base of materials and stop consuming so much.
“The root of all of our problems that we have as humanity right now is overconsumption,” said Muncke.
“There is a possibility to live in harmony with nature on this planet,” she said. “But we cannot continue to let economic interests drive our fate. Because if that’s the case, then it will be the parasite killing the host.”
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Liza Gross is a reporter for Inside Climate News based in Northern California. She is the author of The Science Writers’ Investigative Reporting Handbook and a contributor to The Science Writers’ Handbook, both funded by National Association of Science Writers’ Peggy Girshman Idea Grants. She has long covered science, conservation, agriculture, public and environmental health and justice with a focus on the misuse of science for private gain. Prior to joining ICN, she worked as a part-time magazine editor for the open-access journal PLOS Biology, a reporter for the Food & Environment Reporting Network and produced freelance stories for numerous national outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Discover and Mother Jones. Her work has won awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Society of Professional Journalists NorCal and Association of Food Journalists.
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