Chemical firms and researchers outline policies to boost green chemistry

A new report from Change Chemistry, a green chemistry industry group, and researchers at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, published April 22 on Earth Day, argues that chemical companies need more policy incentives to operate more sustainably.

“The current generation of chemicals and materials benefited from decades of sustained government support. New sustainable chemistry innovations will require similar support to compete against incumbents,” Joel Tickner, founder of Change Chemistry and director of the Sustainable Chemistry Catalyst program at UMass Lowell as well as a professor of public health, said at an April 22 event introducing the report.

The report maps out policies that could incentivize company efforts to get safer and more-sustainable products from research and development (R&D) to the market, as well as policies that could create more demand by making these new products less expensive and risky for users to adopt.

“There is a menu of options to both push supply and pull the demand to sustainable chemistries,” Molly Jacobs, director of applied research at UMass Lowell’s Sustainable Chemistry Catalyst program, said at the event. For some of these policy options, Jacobs and her colleagues turned to successful examples in other industries, such as clean energy and vaccines.

The supply-push options highlighted in the report include R&D grants such as those given by the US National Science Foundation and other federal agencies, as well as subsidies and tax incentives at the federal, state, and local levels.

The companies involved with this report emphasized the demand side of the equation.

“The truth is, you can spend countless efforts and years in the lab doing R&D to develop the perfect alternative, only for it to really struggle to get hold in a market that is still dominated by incumbent chemistries,” Alexander Majer, government affairs director for chemicals management at Dow, said at the April 22 event.

The demand-pull options include governments setting standards for product categories or sectors that require certain percentages of sustainable content, similar to renewable energy standards; guaranteeing markets, as the US government did for COVID-19 vaccines with Operation Warp Speed; and offering tax credits for consumers similar to rebates for energy-efficient technologies. Other options include labeling and preferential purchasing programs, such as the Environmental Protection Agency’s Safer Choice program for cleaning products, and various government purchasing programs to buy and use low-carbon technologies and sustainable products within the government’s own operations.

Lastly, the researchers also pointed out some regulatory incentives, including taxes and fees like those in the California Safer Consumer Products program, which requires the makers of products that currently lack safer alternatives to fund green chemistry research, and regulatory-relief programs like the EPA’s climate-friendly new chemicals initiative, which streamlines the review process for climate-friendly chemicals.

The report also points out that individual policy incentives are not enough to drive a market transformation; they need to be part of larger, long-lasting government strategies. The researchers point to the White House’s 2024 Federal Sustainable Chemistry Strategic Plan and the Department of Energy’s Industrial Decarbonization Roadmap as examples of such strategies.

What’s unhelpful, Tickner said, are “shifting policy priorities and inconsistent support,” which can “undermine investment stability and slow innovation.”

The report pointed to the rollback of funding and incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act as a prime example of policy inconsistency.

The authors compared the challenge of greening chemistry to the challenge of addressing climate change.

“We are not the first to try to achieve large-scale market transformation in an area of the industrial economy,” Jason Pearson, executive director of Change Chemistry, said at the event. “We see the work around transition to safer, more-sustainable chemistry as already underway but at an earlier stage of maturity than the work that has been done to embed climate firmly and strategically within the priorities of most large global companies.”

According to those involved in the report, governments have so far relied much more on regulating the chemical industry than offering incentives for change.

“The biggest driver in the transition to sustainable chemistry, if you look at the history within this space, has been regulation,” Lauren Breynaert, policy and government affairs director at the chitosan manufacturer Tidal Vision, said at the event. “However, we have not made the transition that is needed. And so we definitely need those incentives to pair with regulation.”

Regarding the incentives that are currently available, most focus on R&D when the bigger challenge is market adoption, researchers and company representatives at the event said.

“Market readiness and adoption, rather than R&D, is often the primary bottleneck for sustainable chemistry,” Tickner said.

The report emerged from 12 months of consultation with chemical companies in the US and European Union. The research team surveyed more than 70 companies and interviewed people at a smaller subset of 10 companies, as well as external experts. The researchers also met several times with a working group of representatives from more than 50 companies across different sectors, up and down the chemical value chain.

Overall, much more policy attention is needed, the authors and collaborators said.

Breynaert, who worked in climate policy before moving into chemical policy, said she was “pretty shocked” at the limited depth of policies aimed at the sustainable-chemistry transition. “This is a real big call to action to policymakers.”