‘Chemicals being invented, released too rapidly for scientists to track’

The health impacts probably do not receive as much focus as they should. Our work in Europe and the US has shown that petrochemical plants often release large quantities of toxic chemicals, yet local communities may remain unaware of this. Even when data is reported, it often arrives months later, if at all. Exemptions and claims of commercial sensitivity frequently allow corporations to conceal their activities. For instance, in the US, the Gulf of Mexico is nicknamed Cancer Alley, where people living near these plants experience a significantly higher incidence of cancer. This is well known, yet it remains largely unaddressed. Greater transparency is critical to enable regulators, communities, investors and even corporations to understand the full impact of their actions.

It is a difficult area to regulate because it is an economically important sector in a lot of countries. In the EU, the industry is hugely important in Belgium and bits of the Netherlands and Germany. The companies are huge employers and generate a lot of taxes. So, they have immense sway. There is also a political challenge of regulation. As a politician, you are not going to stand there and say, “Yes, we are happy that our population is being poisoned, but we probably want the tax dollars to pay for the buses, the schools and everything else.” So, you have to find a regulatory regime, which works for the population, but also works for the corporates.

The entire European petrochemical industry has been complaining about regulations in the EU being too high and saying they are going to be outcompeted by plants in Asia, particularly, which they see as being able to produce at a cheaper level. We could argue about whether or not that is purely a regulatory issue. But certainly, they would say they need less regulation and less red tape so that they can stay in Europe and be competitive in a global market.

The other thing to think about with regulation is that there is sometimes a need to release the toxins, unfortunately. If something is going wrong in the plant, it is better to vent and let everything out than have some sort of explosion. So, it is the measure of how you regulate “what is unnecessary” versus “what is necessary”. It may sometimes be a subjective judgment. If you are not on the ground or do not know exactly what is happening, you are relying on the corporate to self-report. Sometimes that can lead to underreporting or, false reporting of the reasons why the toxins might be released.

Regulators have a good idea. Do the public, investors and civil society know? Generally, not. One of the things we found from our work is that the investors have struggled because the transparency in this area is not great. The data on the chemicals they release, even when it is available, is scattered. To bring it all together takes time; the investors are too busy, and this is a small part of their portfolio. A great example of the lack of knowledge was in the US, in the Cancer Alley area. We spoke to one investment house, which was a major investor in some of the plants in that area. They were shocked by the amount of toxins released by the companies. And then they said: “We are also selling health insurance to the people in this area and so we are effectively poisoning our customers and then having to pay for their health insurance.” This underlines a lack of joint thinking or deep dive into some of these impacts, because they are thinking more about profitability and the kind of things that move up stock prices. Sadly, toxic emissions do not impact stock prices.

There is also a lot of variability from regime to regime. So, if we look at, for instance, the EU level, companies are required to report on 91 different release categories. In the US, about 794 different chemicals are required to be reported. The simplistic assumption is that there would be fewer requirements for the US than the EU as the latter is often thought of as a bit of a leader.

There are a variety of reasons. The EU needs to get an agreement between the different countries. So, it is hard to find common ground, whereas the US is one jurisdiction. The other thing is that the EU uses quite a lot of groups, which might require you to report chemicals that have, for instance, chlorine as part of them. The US, on the other hand, might require the reporting of each of the chemicals that have chlorine in them. When it comes to transparency, the EU method is not very helpful because when you put things together in a group, you lose some of that granularity. Now not all chemicals with chlorine added are equally toxic. It is helpful to have a regulation that requires industries to report on specific chemicals. So, transparency has to be about specificity. The industry data should also be accessible to the communities affected by it.

Generally speaking, the answer to this question is a mix. Take plastics, for instance. There are around 16,000 chemicals used in the manufacturing of plastic products. Of those, about 4,000 have been found to be toxic. We would think the rest are okay. But actually, 10,000 have never been tested really. So, these are the chemicals being used, released into the environment and we do not know their long-term or even short-term impacts. For certain chemicals, like asbestos, it is really obvious now that they are bad. But there is a lot out there that we do not know the answer to. When we are talking to investors, we tell them that they need to factor this into the way they think about this industry; that there are big unknowns which could pose a big risk. At the moment, science is trying to catch up, but new chemicals are being released and invented at a much faster rate that it is hard for them [scientists] to stay on top of it.

Why cannot industries be doing that? I guess you could compare this with the pharmaceutical industry which is required to conduct long-term testing for impacts on the body before they are allowed to sell them. Then you have the chemical industry where they just tell the regulator that they are using these chemicals and that is about it.

Still, these chemicals end up in our bodies in the same way as drugs do. If anything, industrial chemicals like plastics are probably more permanent in our bodies than medicines. Pharmaceutical drug development and testing is incredibly costly. There is going to be a pushback and this is a challenge.