We’ve known about chemical pollution for eons.  Well it seems like that long, but of course it’s only since the WWII that chemicals took such a hold on the way we live.  Being so new, and now realising the price being paid for this deluge of fossil-fuel petrochemicals, it’s time to stop the rot, and get off the what has been sold to us as a good thing, but in fact has turned out to have such a sting in its tail that we and the Earth are drowning in the stuff.  But, as Julian Cribb, points out in Earth Detox: How and why we must clean up our planet, (Cambridge University Press, 2021), it doesn’t have to be this way. We certainly don’t need to perpetuate this poisoning any longer.  With plenty of alternatives in the form of Green Chemistry, let’s jump overboard, exit stage right, and give the petrochemical industry the flick.  Here are a few extracts from Earth Detox. 

There is little that humans have done that cannot in some ways be improved, rectified, replaced or undone. The challenge is to quickly build a worldwide concensus for rapid and concerted action against future poisoning.

Our emitted chemicals do not simply disappear, as many people assume – or as the petrochemical industry prefers us to believe.  Their atoms are not destroyed, although their molecular form may alter.  They go on forever, reforming, recycling, recombining, reactivating in manifold forms. They become part of an unending, ever-growing, ever-flowing Planetary river: The Anthropogenic Chemical Circulation (fig 2.1) In this process, however, what is lost is information about the original substance. It becomes untraceably blended with its chemical environment, both natural and man-made. (page 24-25)

The universal pollution of the Planet has mounted year by year, almost unnoticed because it is invisible, and humans prefer to trust their eyes over their other senses including, apparently, over common sense.  One form of pollution that is highly visible is plastic.  By 2020 the global petrochemical industry was pumping out around 400 million tonnes of new plastics a year, said the Worldwide Fund for Nature in a trailblazing study: 

Plastic is not inherently bad; it is a man-made invention that has generated significant benefits for society.  Unfortunately, the way industries and governments have managed plastic, and the way society has converted in into a disposable and single-use convenience, has transformed this innovation into a Planetary environmental disaster, the WWF bluntly states.(page 39) 

Baneful Beauty: One of the first things that the modern citizen does upon waking each morning is try to get cancer.  When people shower, they bathe themselves in chemicals from head to foot, many of which are suspected or known to be toxic, carcinogenic or allergenic. They then go over to cover themselves in a positive chemistry set. Today’s shampoos, soaps, bath gels, cosmetics, lotions, hair sprays, deodorants and perfumes contain a witches’ brew of contaminants – most of them derives from petroleum – that add greatly to the ongoing total exposure of both the user and everyone around them, including babies and children.  “Over a lifetime you will potentially swallow a kilogram of lipstick,’ author of Toxic Beauty, Dawn Mellowship cautioned her readers, noting the average woman used twelve personal care products a day, every year she absorbs about 2 kilograms of cosmetics into her body and that , worldwide, ‘use of cosmetics is out of control.’  (pages 61-62)

Groundwater is one of the Earth’s largest natural resources, accounting for 97 per cent of the Planet’s total available fresh water. It feeds most of our rivers and lakes, supplies 40 per cent of our drinking water needs and 43 per cent of the irrigation water used to grow food. Groundwater can travel tens to hundreds of kilometres underground and is recharged by rainfall on timescales ranging from days to millions of years. Consequently, if it becomes contaminated, the contamination can travel far, in both space and time.  The main sources of groundwater contamination are leaky landfills, hazardous waste disposal, illicit industrial discharges and dumping, seepage from old garages and fuel stores, factory sites and gasometers, mining and tailings from dams, ‘fracking’, oil and chemical spills, fire-fighting chemicals, dry cleaning and mechanical solvents, badly managed sewage systems, medications, city runoff and farm chemicals …  see the figure. (page 45) 

There is little that humans have done that cannot in some ways be improved, rectified, replaced or undone. The challenge is to quickly build a worldwide concensus for rapid and concerted action against future poisoning that make all these things happen. The first point for all citizens to understand is that Earth system toxification will not be curbed, solved, or even minimised if left to government regulation and industry compliance alone, so long as billions of consumers all around the world persist in issuing economic commands for the mass release of toxins, to continue. (page 201).

Clean up methods: Despite the unhelpful attitude of the chemical industry as a whole, many individual chemists and some companies – those with a conscience or high ehtical and moral principles – have begun work on approaches that show promise for reducing the overall chemical burden on humanity, especially if supported by strong regulation as well as clear market signals from consumers and citizens.  These approaches include:

.. Life cycle assessment (LCA)
.. Material flow analysis (MFA)
.. Multi-criteria analysis (MCA)
.. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) or product stewardship
.. Green Chemistry
.. Green manufacturing
.. Green building
.. Integrated Pest Management (IPM)
.. Regenerative farming
.. Chemical leasing
.. Industrial ecology
.. Zero waste
.. Risk assessment and remediation
(pages 207-210) 

There are reasons why society is reluctant to acknowledge the scale of death and sickness linked to global chemical poisoning. One of them is that the main professions – chemists, doctors, engineers, farmers, manufacturers – are insufficiently trained and equipped to anticipate and prevent chemical poisoning in the first place.  Doctors for example, who are seeing more and more influencers of chemotoxicity in the slew of lifestyle diseases they must diagnose and deal with every day, are them-selves reliant on the petrochemical industry to supply the raw materials for the drugs they prescribe to try to cure or ease these selfsame lifestyle diseases. Modern medicine is, to a degree, compromised by its dependence for healing on the very process that casued the disease. (page 212)

Curbing the volume, composition and toxicity of the chemical assault on humanity is the only true solution to the poisoning of humanity and the world. Just as checking climate change involves, eventually, replacing all fossil fuels with safe alternatives, the same principle applies to the global chemical suffusion (outpouring or spread across the earth and her people) (page 218) 

A chemically informed society is a prerequisite step towards detoxing the Planet. (page 221)

Curbing the volume, composition and toxicity of the chemical assault on humanity is the only try solution to the poisoning of humanity and the world. Just as checking climate change involves, eventually, replacing all fossil fuels with safe alternatives, the same principle applies to the global chemical suffusion (outpouring or spread across the earth and her people) (page 218)  A chemically informed society is a prerequisite step towards detoxing the Planet, including reducing drug dependence, replacement of plastics and synthetic fibres with natural or safe substitutes, cleansing the poisoned air of our homes and cities, purifying our streams and lakes and groundwater, producing safe manufactured goods by safe methods. (page 221) 

The acknowledgement of our shared responsibility for the chemical pollution of ourselves and the Planet, moves us beyond the sterile and unproductive argument over who is to blame, and whether or not industry is at fault for producing what we, the market, order it to produce by our spending patterns. (page 223)

The harmful role of chemicals in resource crises needs to be clearly mapped and mitigated. The role of chemistry in recycling, in building the global circular economy, in developing safe and sustainable alternative materials, in ending pollution and locking up poisons and in cleaning up contaminated regions needs to be ramped up. This will involve the chemical profession and industry shifting from a harm-inflicting to a healing, regenerative mindset, helped by universal consumer demand to motivate it. Female leadership may be essential in this transition. Consumer support for green chemistry certainly will be. (page 230)

Detox the Earth: A Ten Point Plan (pages 244-245) 

The harmful role of chemicals in resource crises needs to be clearly mapped and mitigated. The role of chemistry in recycling, in building the global circular economy, in developing safe and sustainable alternative materials, in ending pollution and locking up poisons and in cleaning up contaminated regions needs to be ramped up. This will involve the chemical profession and industry shifting from a harm-inflicting to a healing, regenerative mindset, helped by universal consumer demand to motivate it. Female leadership may be essential in this transition. Consumer support for green chemistry certainly will be. (page 250)

– Julian Cribb, in Earth Detox: How and why we must clean up our planet, Cambridge University Press, 2021