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In our recent report, "The Invisible Tsunami," we tackled the largely underestimated risk of chemical toxicity, an unseen threat present in our air, food, and water. The report analysed the problem and solution spaces, revealing how toxic chemicals are produced, how they move through the environment and enter our bodies, and their effects on human health and ecosystems. It also shone a light on some of the emerging technologies which can make our world safer. But is there money to be made in developing such technologies? To answer that, we’ll explore the commercial opportunities in creating a toxicity free future.
Underpinning the commercial opportunities in detoxifying the economy is an assumption that somebody will care. This could be manufacturers, governments, the consumer, or all three. The explosion of climate technology may be an instructive analogy. Investment in decarbonising the economy is sensible because the need for it is underwritten by Earth science. To be sure that there will be demand for climate solutions all you need to know is that greenhouse gas concentrations are increasing and that they heat the planet. Therefore all the major industries emitting greenhouse gases will at some point need to be updated with new technologies which don’t, or else offset with greenhouse gas removal. Early on very few people recognised this and now almost everyone does, but at the end of the day fluctuating opinions don’t matter. Until greenhouse gas concentrations substantially fall, new climate technology investment, in general, should pay off in the long run. The scenario in which it doesn’t pay off is if we fail to invest even when the costs of climate disruption far outweigh the costs of decarbonising. Is it worth even planning for such a future? A great example of success is the transformation of electricity generation, with increased solar and wind capacity more than covering 2025’s increase in global electricity demand so far.
Can we say the same for detoxifying the economy? It’s easy to be certain about decarbonisation today because we’re past the point of consensus, but for detoxification most people are still unaware of the problem. The opportunity is so big because we’re currently at the stage at which awareness is rapidly growing, and this time the long term need for new technologies is underwritten by biology.
In The Invisible Tsunami we collected some of the most compelling evidence produced by numerous scientific researchers that many of the chemicals we are exposed to every day are harming human and ecosystem health. In common with greenhouse gasses, production has increased enormously over a short time (chemical production has increased 50 fold since the 1950s). Another commonality is the consequences of this rapid buildup of production and concentrations over time. For example: PFAS, like CO2, continues to be released to the environment in greater quantities every year where it persists, likely for much longer than CO2, due to its chemical stability. As with CO2 and climate change, we know that as PFAS concentration increases in our water, soil, food and blood the likelihood of negative effects increases. We also understand that the Earth system does not always respond to changes linearly and that various non-linear tipping points exist. The same is true for the body’s response to increasing concentrations of toxicants. Communities exposed to locally high levels of PFAS are known to experience higher rates of various health conditions with some resorting to blood letting to decontaminate their bodies. With rainwater itself containing PFAS at a hazardous level in many locations around the world, does it seem more likely that we will allow global PFAS concentrations to increase indefinitely, risking the health of everyone on Earth, or that we will drastically reduce PFAS production by creating safer chemicals, products and processes which don’t require them?
The good news is that most toxic chemicals degrade much faster than PFAS, meaning if we stop producing them we’ll quite quickly reduce our exposure to them. Perhaps the best news though, is that governments and consumers can drive detoxification out of self interest alone. Since much of our exposure is mediated through the products we fill our houses with and the food we eat, increasing consumer awareness can drive detoxification. Analogously, chemical pollution from factories typically affects the local environment much more than the environment in other countries so there is often no tragedy of the commons. The International Chemical Secretariat (ChemSec) provides a thorough analysis of the incentives for the chemical industry to detoxify in a recent report..
The toxicity landscape
At a first glance, safer products can appear to be niche, perhaps limited to boutique brands and eco-conscious consumers. However, we believe the opportunity is much larger and can roughly be split between four requirements for a non-toxic economy in order of priority: 1) production of safer chemicals and materials, 2) testing for toxicants in the environment, goods and people, 3) clean-up of existing pollution, and 4) medical intervention to remediate the effects of toxicant exposure.
If we focus first on the need for safer chemicals and materials, we could estimate that market to be a significant fraction of the global chemical industry, which has a revenue of around six trillion dollars per year. 6,000 chemicals account for 99 % of production volume, which means a relatively small number of substitutions to safer chemistry could have a large impact on toxicity and capture a lot of value. But roughly how much of the chemical industry is ripe for a safety upgrade? ChemSec pointed out in a 2023 report that if the chemicals used in the European Union are broken down by mass, 75 % of this mass is considered harmful to humans and/or the environment.
Furthermore, some of the largest production volume chemicals are very well known to be hazardous, for example 37 million tonnes of bisphenol A (BPA) are produced per year, as are around 7 million tonnes of phthalates. Furthermore, several pesticides are harmful to humans and the environment, and the global pesticides market is around 100 billion USD. Similarly, the global plastics market, an enormous contributor to toxicity, is around half a trillion USD. There are also significant toxicity issues in the personal care products market, which has a global size of around 300 billion USD, and in clothing, which has a total market of 1.7 trillion USD. Of course there is some overlap between these markets (i.e., much clothing is made of plastic) and so they should not be added up to find a total safer chemistry market. Nonetheless, the take-home message is that there are several enormous markets in which safer chemicals and materials are required.
In toxicant testing, non-profit initiatives like Plasticlist, and now Open Label are increasing consumer awareness of toxicant contamination of food via published test results, while the Million Marker Research Institute is making similar efforts in personal care products. Greater consumer awareness seems to be filtering through to producers, who can now partner with Light Labs for transparent toxicant testing of their products. The food safety testing market currently stands at 21 billion USD. In toxicant testing specifically of people, Million Marker now offers urine testing for a small number of pervasive endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) while other such as Function (valued at 2.5 billion USD) offer blood testing for toxicants such as heavy metals as part of a suite of personalised medical testing. Growth in toxicant monitoring will hopefully drive and inform innovation in safer chemistry.
It is challenging to estimate the future market for cleaning up existing pollution, as the extent of action required in the future would likely depend quite strongly on regulation. However, to get a feeling for the overall potential market it may be instructive to look at clean-up cost estimates for PFAS, which are estimated to cost around 95 billion Euros over 20 years just for legacy PFAS in Europe. However, removing all PFAS, including those still produced today, could reach 100 billion euros per year. These are potentially optimistic scenarios, with others estimating the true costs could be in the several trillions. A modern day analogy could be the market for asbestos abatement services, which are still around 1 billion USD just for the US market, despite the fact that production peaked as early as the 1970s.
Although we may envisage superfund sites when we think of cleaning up existing pollution, this can also encompass small, consumer purchases like water filters. While the global market for water purifiers includes drives to remove waterborne diseases, the US (which has disease free drinking water) has a market of 3 billion USD for water purifiers, the growth of which is likely driven by the consumer’s desire to remove toxicants. Ideally consumers would not be concerned about drinking water quality and the onus would be on water utilities. Tap water maximum contaminant levels (MCLs) for persistent pollutants like PFAS will probably continue to drop, likely requiring investment in new water treatment technologies. Toxicity concerns relevant to water utilities also include the safe disposal of toxicant contaminated sewage sludge and treated effluent to rivers. Since water utilities are often publicly owned, it is difficult to estimate a global market size, however the opportunities for toxicant cleanup within water treatment are likely very large, to give an indication: the largest water utility in the USA, serving 14 million people has a market capitalisation of 28 billion USD. (Disclosure: DSV previously spun out one company treating sewage sludge and one other treating industrial wastewater.)
Medical intervention to remediate toxicant exposure is of course a market we hope will not need to grow. An established technology is chelation therapy to remove heavy metals from the bodies of those who have suffered exposure. The market for Succimer, one of the more commonly used chelating agents, is 172 million USD. To our knowledge there are no companies currently offering clinically approved removal of other toxicants, such as PFAS, from the body. Recent PFAS water contamination on the Island of Jersey resulted in affected residents being recommended bloodletting for removal and with 23,000 PFAS contaminated sites in Europe alone, there is likely an unmet need for better solutions.
Lessons from history for developing safer chemicals
Even with massive markets, is there any evidence that industries will shift to less toxic alternatives once they become available? History provides a clear answer. The first significant change driven by a desire to eliminate toxicity was probably the switch from white to red phosphorus matches in 1910, prompted by the devastating "phossy jaw" disease: a rather horrific necrosis of the jaw bone suffered by matchmakers who inhaled white phosphorus. Since then, the economy has undergone several episodes of creative destruction in which safer products have displaced toxic incumbents:
- Unleaded gasoline started displacing leaded petrol (gasoline) from the 1970s
- Asbestos insulation was replaced with mineral and glass wool insulation from the 1980s onwards.
- Winners included manufacturers such as Rockwool and Isover. Today Rockwool is valued at 8 billion USD.
- Tritium replaced radium in luminescent watches from the 1960s onwards, and was itself replaced by photoluminescent materials from the 1990s onwards.
- Nemoto & Co developed the photoluminescent material Super-LumiNova, which likely captures more than half of the 300 million USD phosphorescent pigment market.
- Starting in the early 2000s, increasing consumer concerns over the safety of personal care products, especially artificial ingredients like paraben preservatives, motivated the personal care sector to move towards “natural” formulations which use as few synthetically produced components as possible.
- Some winners include companies dedicated specifically to producing products which are as safe and non-synthetic as possible such as Green People, Burt’s Bees, and Dime. Burt’s Bees was acquired by Clorox for 900 million USD in 2007.
- From the 1980s until the early 2010s, plastic water bottles were dominant, however as concerns mounted about the migration of plastic chemicals (i.e. BPA from polycarbonate bottles) consumers shifted mainly to stainless steel metal alternatives or “BPA free” plastic formulations.
- Winners making stainless steel bottles include companies like Chilly’s, Hydro Flask, and Yeti, while The Eastman Chemical Company produces a bisphenol free polycarbonate alternative: Tritan co-polyester, which is used by Nalgene for water bottles. 7 years after its founding, Hydro Flask was acquired for 210 million USD in 2016.
- Pesticides have gone through several iterations, and new developments have often been driven by a desire to reduce off-target toxicity (although resistance and patents coming to the end of their terms are other drivers). Although the neonicotinoids we use today still have some serious ecotoxicity problems, they are safer (at least for humans) than the original organochlorine pesticides like DDT and aldrin.
- Some notable winners in the field of safer pesticides include Agraquest, a producer of bio-pesticides which was founded in 1995 and acquired by Bayer in 2012 for 425 M USD. Another bio-pesticide producer, Stoller Group was acquired for 1.2 billion USD in 2023.
The main lesson from history is that safer chemicals and materials do displace toxic products and can generate enormous public good in doing so. For example, it is estimated that banning leaded petrol increased average IQ by between 2 to 5 points and produced a net economic benefit of 8 trillion dollars since 1980.
However, history provides some cautionary tales too. The story of the successive generations of synthetic pesticides has generally been an unsatisfactory one, with new concerns tending to emerge with each generation. For example, organochlorine pesticides were phased out due to bioaccumulation concerns only to be replaced with neurotoxic organophosphates. Similarly, the road to safer petrol after the lead era was rough, as the initial substitute anti-knocking agent MTBE contaminated drinking water.
Unfortunately most BPA elimination efforts were as not successful as the switch to stainless steel water bottles. In many applications like thermal receipt papers, structurally similar bisphenols such as bisphenol S were used as drop in replacements, but these have shown similar toxic effects. A similar story is the regrettable substitution of the first PFAS perfluoroalkyl acids PFOA and PFOS simply with other short chain PFAS molecules, for example: GenX, which shows signs of being just as toxic as its predecessors.
What can we learn from the successes and mistakes of the past to help us develop safer products for the future? Ethanol is an ideal substitute for tetraethyl lead in petrol because it replaces a highly toxic novel chemical with a less toxic and well understood biologically-derived alternative which is already in the human diet. This reveals a potential strategy: to test the suitability of well known existing chemicals in new applications. However, it isn’t always possible to find such convenient existing alternatives and so new compounds must be synthesised.
While sometimes no news is good news, no toxicology data is not good toxicology data. Big mistakes can be avoided by applying some common chemical sense.
That BPS would have similar interactions with the body as BPA is unsurprising if we compare the structures. Similarly, it was well known that the reason for the environmental persistence of PFOA was that the molecule resists breakdown due to the strong carbon-fluorine bonds and their effect on the stability of the carbon-carbon bonds in the chain. Looking at the structures of PFOA and GenX we can see that they share this obvious feature.
Even if there are no obvious chemical similarities to the incumbent, when bringing a newly synthesised molecule to market it is always at a data disadvantage to the incumbent because there will be no epidemiological studies on its effects in the human population. It is also incredibly likely that it will have been studied less in in vitro and animal testing toxicology studies than whatever it is replacing. It is therefore easy to say “there is no evidence this new chemical poses the same health threats as the incumbent” but the lack of evidence really only reveals our ignorance of the chemical’s risks. A strategy to ensure safer and not just different chemistry is developed can follow the following logic. First ask if the product or process can be redesigned so it does not require the chemical of concern, then ask if a well characterised safer chemical could be used to replace it. If a new chemical must be synthesised, don’t create a replacement which shares the same problematic structural features of the original and ensure adequate testing for chemical hazards is conducted and made public before bringing the new chemical to market.
Commercial constraints and drivers
Since there is not a single “toxicity market” the commercial constraints are largely individual to each market. However, there are some commonalities across all efforts to reduce toxicity. The main forces which drive markets to adopt safer chemistries are the following:
Consumer awareness is a large driver of demand for safer personal care products, household cleaning products, food, kitchenware, clothing, and even furniture. The most important commercial constraint in these markets is lack of awareness, since only consumers who know that incumbent products are unsafe will be interested in paying a premium for safer alternatives. The good news is that awareness is growing very quickly from a low baseline. A sub-constraint of consumer awareness is safety data. In many cases it is challenging, even for a motivated consumer, to choose safer products because there is sparse data. For example, while ingredients and nutritional information are easily findable on food labels, in almost all cases it isn’t currently possible to see which chemicals have contaminated food. Fortunately, there is a growing movement for greater transparency with non-profit initiatives like Plasticlist and Open Label Research testing food for dangerous chemicals and publishing their analysis. For personal care products, the Environmental Working Group runs a transparent safety certification system and the Million Marker Research Institute also tests personal care products for dangerous chemicals. The majority of these initiatives have only been started in the last few years and so consumer awareness and transparency is expected to increase as a driver of demand.
Producer awareness of both the hazards of the chemicals manufacturers are currently using and the safer alternatives available is increasing and driving action largely due to the efforts of a handful of non-profit initiatives. The (substitute it now) SIN List is used by companies to check which of the chemicals they are using are hazardous and likely to soon become regulated under REACH. Green Screen for safer chemicals can be used to compare hazard assessments of different chemicals, to promote switching to safer alternatives across a variety of applications. Chem Forward is increasing access to chemical hazard data by centralising the chemical hazard data collected by several companies into a centralised trust. Chem Forward has also collaborated with Apple and Google among others on a project to find safer chemicals for the manufacturing of consumer electronics.
Litigation also drives change. For example, 3M announced it will completely phase out its production of PFAS and it is understood that this is because of the enormous legal liability it already faces for environmental contamination and personal injury. Just one example is the reformulation of its famous Scotchgard stain repellent to be non-PFAS. Bayer has so far settled lawsuits for around 10 billion of dollars related to damages from glyphosate exposures, which motivated its development of the replacement herbicide icafolin.
Regulation obviously plays a large part too, however, regulators in most cases find it easier to phase out dangerous products when a feasible alternative already exists. In this way, bringing alternatives to market can help create the regulatory environment needed for them to flourish. Tighter regulations on the limits of PFAS allowed in wastewater and drinking water in the USA have motivated the creation of several start-ups such as 374 Water (which was founded in 2018 and IPOd in 2022) and Puraffinity who have developed technologies to remove PFAS from water down to very low concentrations. Another example is chlorophyrfos which was a commonly used pesticide, but its ban in the EU and USA motivated the development of alternatives such as acelepryn.
Some other notable commercial successes in detoxification:
- Notpla: Founded in 2014 now at series A. Produces biodegradable food packaging from seaweed and has a partnership with Just Eat.
- P2 Science: Founded in 2011 and now at series D. Synthesises bio-based non-toxic alternatives to ingredients for consumer and personal care products to replace, for example, phthalates and molecular silicones.
- Mimikai: Founded in 2016 to produce non-toxic insect repellent and is now at series A.
- Agraquest: Founded in 1995 and acquired by Bayer in 2012 for 425 M USD, developed biopesticides.
- Valspar: Acquired by Sherwin Williams in 2017 for 11.3 billion USD. Valspar created a number of products in coatings and packaging, including a less toxic, non-BPA-based aluminium can lining.
- Synergio: Founded in 2007, now at series A. A computational database and platform to help manufacturers to choose safer ingredients for personal care products and consumer products.
Today investors are becoming more aware of toxicity-related financial risks and conversely the opportunities in detoxification. As a result investor groups have formed including ChemSec’s Investor Initiative on Hazardous Chemicals (IIHC) and Clean Production Action’s Investor Environmental Health Network (IEHN) among others.
To conclude, the pursuit of a toxicity-free future represents a colossal commercial opportunity across several major industries. Historical precedents confirm that safer alternatives, driven by consumer awareness, regulation, and innovation, can in fact successfully displace toxic incumbents, creating scalable and profitable enterprises in the process.