A Letter from Change Chemistry Executive Director Joel Tickner

Dear Colleagues,

In late September, as part of Climate Week, Change Chemistry and the American Chemical Society Green Chemistry Institute joined forces to host the inaugural ACS-Change Chemistry Sustainability Leader Summit, gathering sustainability leaders from across the chemicals and formulated product sectors to discuss the role of green and sustainable chemistry in addressing corporate sustainability goals and to share challenges and collaborate on solutions. The Summit’s discussion-based format allowed for significant learning and cross-fertilization of lessons and strategies reflecting the broad range of perspectives across subsectors of the chemicals and formulated products.

Companies across the value chain now face increasing demands from governments and investors to measure and report on a growing spectrum of sustainability attributes—from climate impact to biodiversity to waste. These requirements pose significant challenges, including inconsistent metrics, measurement difficulties, and evaluation of potential trade-offs. Often, these challenges can lead to piecemeal solutions that inadvertently shift risks, solving one problem while creating another. For instance, in response to investor and governmental demands for carbon reduction, companies have implemented various control mechanisms such as carbon capture, electrification, and the substitution of virgin fossil carbon with biomass and advanced recycling. While these solutions leverage existing chemistries and processes, they may not address other impacts, such as toxicity or production level impacts, or pose new risks.

A largely unexplored avenue for defossilization involves addressing the underlying chemistry that is foundational to most industrial processes and products. Sustainable chemistry practices can equip companies with the necessary tools, practices, and information to make informed choices as they transition to safer and more sustainable chemistry, processes, and products.

Participants identified a number of barriers to sustainable chemistry innovations that can address multiple sustainability attributes, including limited incentives and long-term capital, lack of a clear and strong business case, institutional barriers including concerns over inconsistent supplies and performance, regulatory frameworks that may work against sustainable chemistry, and a lack of standardized metrics for reporting on sustainable chemistry investments  Despite these barriers, participants noted that smart regulations (including incentives) and changing consumer preferences driven by social media are important drivers.  

Despite the barriers, Summit participants highlighted a number of strategies to accelerate sustainable chemistry innovation and adoption, including:

• Encouraging regular engagement between different sub-sectors of the chemical industry to exchange best practices and foster innovation. 

• Prioritizing the education cross-business unit of internal stakeholders, including marketing and sales teams, about the importance of sustainable chemistry efforts and their connection to the company’s goals.

• Educating investors on the long-term financial benefits of investing in sustainable chemistry. 

• Working toward a consistent, standardized framework to track and report sustainable chemistry innovation and adoption across the value chain which can align with existing sustainability reporting standards like CSRD and can lead to meaningful improvement.

• Building stronger business cases and success case studies – that capture non-tangible benefits – and tell compelling stories.   

• Developing policy strategies to incentivize the supply and adoption of demonstrable green and sustainable chemistries customizable to different needs, that align pull and push strategies to support whole value chain mobilization (create value along the value chain) from raw material to adoption and public/private investment.

• Educating policymakers on challenges and needs for sustainable chemistry innovation.

The challenges and needs identified during the summit are consistent with ones we’ve heard at Change Chemistry for almost two decades. However, supporting sustainability leaders in firms, who are often the visible faces of their companies to investors and external stakeholders but who also must be “generalists” who manage a portfolio of sustainability issues to be champions for sustainable chemistry, provides an important leverage point for accelerating innovation and adoption. Our experience is that sustainability leaders spend multiple business units in firms, but given corporate sustainability reporting requirements, must have C-suite access. Creating networks to support professionals in this space as well as supporting the development of the future workforce is an important area of collaboration for ACS GCI and Change Chemistry.