WHEN the US chemicals company DuPont adopted the slogan 鈥淏etter Things for Better Living鈥� Through Chemistry鈥� in 1935, it was to try to win over a public wary of new synthetic materials such as nylon, neoprene and pesticides. It seems to have succeeded. For most people, life today is steeped in synthetic chemicals.
Many of these chemicals are benign and do indeed make life better, delivering superior medicines, higher agricultural yields, innovative materials, cleaner water, magical electronic products and a radical abundance of consumer goods.
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But better living through chemistry has turned out to be a Faustian pact. Over the past century, tens of thousands of chemicals have been released into the wild with barely a thought for the effects on human health and the environment.
As a problem, this is hardly news, but we are only just getting to grips with its monumental scale. Earlier this year, the United Nations declared waste and pollution to be the third great planetary crisis alongside climate change and biodiversity loss.
鈥淲e鈥檙e only just getting to grips with the monumental scale of the chemicals crisis鈥�
In truth, all three are facets of a crisis with the same underlying cause: excessive consumption fed by a linear economic system, which extracts resources, creates useful things (and plenty of useless ones too) and discards the waste products.
Human ingenuity and innovation caused this crisis 鈥� but its solutions lie there too. Enlightened industrial chemists and the companies they work for are looking to atone for past actions, developing cleaner, more sustainable products, and working to recognise and remediate the worst effects.
But the pace of change, especially in legislation, is too slow, and greenwash still too prevalent. Leading chemists are now calling for the establishment of a body similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to coordinate and disseminate research on the extent and effects of chemical pollution. That is to be welcomed as a first step towards meaningful international action.
We don鈥檛 need to retreat into a world without synthetic chemicals. We still need better living 鈥� but this time it must be through better chemistry.
