Scaling Sustainable Solvents: A Collaborative Path to Safer Solutions in 2025

Each year, 30 million metric tons of solvents are used globally across a wide variety of industrial, manufacturing and consumer goods applications.  Solvents are used in most manufacturing value chains with many being incorporated within thousands of consumer products. Unfortunately, most industrial and commercial solvents are petrochemically derived and many pose significant human health risks such as carcinogenicity, acute toxicity, neurotoxicity and reproductive toxicity.  As our collaborative community works towards mobilizing chemicals, processes, and products that are safer and healthier for people and ecosystems, solvents represent a critical class of chemistries for which we need to transition towards safer and more sustainable alternatives. 

However, this transition will not be easy.  Current manufacturing processes and products were designed around the attributes of specific solvents; solvents that are readily and reliably available, at scale, for “pennies a pound”.  Most solvents are quite versatile and are used, or can be found, in several disparate applications, often serving multiple functions in an application (such as semiconductors).  And while solvents are involved in the production of millions of different manufactured goods, there are only about 200 principal solvents in use. For this reason, approaching substitution on a solvent-by-solvent basis is difficult. Endeavoring to replace a single solvent across all product categories, along different value chains and across industry verticals will force alternatives to be assessed primarily on commodity commercial metrics. This is why, despite the significant work over the past 30 years, very few successful substitutions have been realized. 

So, how should we approach this transition?  This is the question that was discussed at the 2024 Innovators Roundtable during our Scaling Sustainable Solvents panel.  After hearing from industry leaders about their efforts, successes and lessons learned, the participants brainstormed different approaches through which to tackle the solvents challenge. The energy and enthusiasm in the room was evident; clearly, we struck a nerve – and the resulting ideas helped us frame out a different approach. 

In 2025, Change Chemistry will try this different approach.  Specifically, a value-chain based approach that breaks down solvent use across the value chain – retailers, brand owners and chemical producers – with an initial focus on a range of uses in consumer formulated products sold in retail.  Our goal: Enable substitution of high concern solvents present in the consumer goods occupying physical and virtual store shelves (where there are stronger policy and market drivers and lower volume requirements) to build capacity, bolster supply chains and develop markets for solvent alternatives.  We will map out criteria for safer and more sustainable solvents and demonstrate how functional needs can be met with these alternatives and provide retailers with data that can be used to further influence up the value chain.  In essence, we are targeting “small victories” where successful substitutions will validate the performance of solvent alternatives while generating data and seeding market demand to support future substitution efforts. 

As with all our activities, collaboration is key.  So, if you are interested in helping shape and supporting this effort, please reach out to learn more about this initiative and how you can get involved.