At the beginning of July, I attended the first ever international conference on petrochemicals and climate change, held at Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge.

As an ex-academic, I do miss the buzz of a conference, and the extended timeline available for networking. It means you can spend the first day hiding in the corner, feeling awkward, because you still have two more days to meet interesting and useful contacts.

I was there to give a short talk about our work on chemical industry decarbonisation policy at Green Alliance, specifically our most recent report on alternative chemical feedstocks. But there were many fascinating talks and conversations, and it was definitely worth getting out of the office for. Here are my five main takeaways.

1. There are many organisations across the world worried about and working on the climate impacts of the chemical industry

I’d guess there were almost 100 people in attendance overall, from a huge diversity of geographies and backgrounds. I met a member of the Vietnamese climate change committee, academics of many disciplines from Europe, India, Australia, East Asia, Canada and the US, plastics campaigners working on the global plastics treaty, just transition researchers, slavery descendants’ campaigners fighting toxic pollution in ‘cancer alley’ Louisiana, and other NGO and policy thinkers from the UK and Europe. Noticeably absent was any representation from the petrochemical industry itself, which was a stipulation of the conference funders, the V Kann Rasmussen Foundation.

Sometimes our Green Alliance work on chemicals decarbonisation can feel somewhat lonely in Westminster, so it was inspiring to meet others and hear the many voices elsewhere doing great work.

2. Wider environmental and social impacts are inseparable, and solutions aren’t simple

This is obvious if you think about it, but sometimes we don’t stop to think about it. Even if we could turn off or capture the carbon emissions from the chemical manufacturing processes, the environmental and health impacts of this industry are huge.

Our thinking around alternative feedstocks ties in here, because new and innovative ways of making useful chemicals should mean, in most cases, less pollution. But avoiding pollution and toxic products must also be one of the guiding criteria for innovative development. Ultimately, the best way to avoid negative impacts is to not make some products at all. Which leads on to the next point.

3. Reducing demand is critical, but oversupply must also be tackled

Our seas are swimming with plastic pollution, our bodies are tagged with forever chemicals and information feeds are plastered with adverts coaxing us to buy ever more stuff. There is widespread agreement amongst policy makers, civil society and even parts of industry that we need to reduce our demand for chemicals and materials, even if we don’t all agree exactly how to make that happen.

Even if we could reduce our demand for chemicals and plastics, it’s not obvious that this would solve the problem. The global glut of cheap plastics is driven by a supply that far outstrips demand, damaging recycling rates.

Some researchers, including here at Green Alliance, argue that we must be careful not to insist on a total plastic phase out without wider behaviour changes, because that could simply lead to substitution to materials with worse impacts. They are right of course, but how does that positioning affect the wider narrative of the fight against plastic pollution?

4. Are chemicals ‘essential’? There is a battle over this framing

With chemicals in at least 90 per cent of the everyday products around us, it isn’t hard to name a chemical that we’d consider essential to our health and wellbeing in the modern world. But the petrochemical industry evades scrutiny and delays ambitious regulatory change by hiding behind this concept of necessity.

Professor Alice Mah of the University of Glasgow framed this well at the conference, she said that there are lots of chemical products which are beneficial whilst also being harmful, many which are harmful without being particularly beneficial. But there are none which are solely beneficial with no harms whatsoever. [I’m paraphrasing what she said from memory].

5. Disentangling chemical manufacturing from the fossil fuel industry could tip it towards greater sustainability

How do we get from today’s destructive, fossil fuel reliant chemical industry to a future where those truly essential functions are provided without transgressing the boundaries of sustainability? Somehow we need to end the oversupply of superfluous products driven by the insatiable need for growth and profit. Easier said than done, though.

One small piece of this puzzle might be the green carbon mandate for chemicals that we are encouraging the government to explore. Requiring a fraction of the embedded carbon content in chemicals to come from truly sustainable sources would automatically restrict the amount of fossil fuel based chemicals produced. We must strive to reach a point where the chemical industry’s sole purpose is to provide useful chemicals, and not also to use up the by-products of the fossil fuel industry.

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• Source: https://greenallianceblog.org.uk/2024/07/29/five-things-i-learned-at-the-first-petrochemicals-and-climate-change-conference/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=five-things-i-learned-at-the-first-petrochemicals-and-climate-change-conference