Chemical Industry and World Wildlife Fund Work Together

This is like the cleanest kid in class working with someone to get cleaner, but maybe it starts a trend?

Oct 13, 2020

Novozymes launches an enzyme that adds nearly $1 million per year in revenue for a plant – IL BIOECONOMISTA

Chemical Industry and Cleaner Water

The pairing of Novozymes and WWF is interesting for a number of reasons. The first being that Novozymes, a global manufacturer of enzyme catalysts, is bringing in a well respected non-profit to provide feedback on how Novozymes can be better at water and energy conservation. The second reason is that Novozymes is a company that produces enzyme catalysts, an environmentally friendly product. Novoyzmes enzyme catalysts can be used in many industrial and chemical processes and can even be used for wastewater treatment. Novozymes’ situation is like if a solar cell or wind turbine manufacturer was concerned about their own energy use and have pledged to run a factory off of 100% renewable energy with goals for water use reductions.

Novozymes’ catalysts can be used to make softer jeans, synthesize and digest plastics, make food stay fresher for longer, and cause chemicals to fall out of wastewater. In terms of a third party partner to understand Novozymes’ environmental impact they are utilizing the well known World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and this is significant because chemical companies often rely on internal regulatory processes and work with local governments to make sure they are compliant with local laws. Novozymes is going a step further and it seems they want to be leaders in the chemical industry when it comes to water and energy use. It will be easier for Novozymes to take the moral high ground on their enzyme and microbial technology if they can actually possess the moral high ground as determined by someone reputable like the WWF.

The third reason why I think Novozymes working with WWF is significant is because the chemical industry has a history of dumping chemical waste into fresh water.

A Brief History of the Chemical Industry and Water Pollution

General Electric between 1944-1947 is estimated to have dumped 1.3 million pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the Hudson River. PCBs were used as fire retardants in plastics and construction products, but their interaction with humans and animals have shown to be potentially cancer causing, a source of birth defects, and liver damage. PCBs would eventually be banned from use as a fire retardant, but they still remain in the Hudson river and represents a large liability for GE.

More recently DuPont knowingly used and allowed the leaking of polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) into ground water. The first lawsuit against DuPont was filed in 1999. The PFAS DuPont used was perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and its main purpose was a processing aid in making polytetrafluoroethylene otherwise known as Teflon. This polymer is used in non-stick cookware, production of Gore Tex, and a wide variety of industrial and consumer products. Teflon is almost impossible to process without an aid like PFAS. The amount of lawsuits that built up over PFAS pollution was enough for DuPont to spin their fluorinated products business off into a separate company named Chemours. Many thought that this spinoff would be to mitigate DuPont’s ultimate liability in the matter, but it’s uncertain who Delaware and other states will ultimately hold liable for the pollution.

Then Dow and DuPont merged into DowDuPont, which then split off the joint agriculture business Corteva (which still holds liability on PFAS), and the new Dow and Dupont. This all happened about 3 years after the initial New York Times story broke in 2016. I think the spinoffs, mergers, and divestitures will ultimately make it harder to hold people liable for the pollution.

In addition to just those two high profile instances there are a host of other instances where chemical makers, coal producers, and industrialized farming have caused pollution. One might even call this a chronic pollution scenario and could be a reason why the chemical and oil industries have been cast as villains in Hollywood. It is not an undeserved judgement. One can hope providing shareholder value results in improving environmental and workplace safety because it is an easy way to protect shareholders from liabilities.

Novozymes is hoping to change all of this with WWF and I hope they will set the standard that the rest of the industry can follow. The chemical industry appears to be changing for the better, but the industry is only as good as the people working for it. If people within organizations push for higher standards in conjunction with good government policy then I think the future is bright.

Water Scarcity and a Better Future

This future of do-gooders in the chemical industry and policy makers with deep knowledge of what chemicals are, how they are made, and how the industry functions needs to be cultivated further. Hopefully, the readers of this newsletter will be or could eventually become the chemical do-gooders that help transform our world.

Pollution of water seems insane when we think of how scarce freshwater is to humans. Scarcity of water has been covered by a multitude of sources including the New York Times, Netflix, James Bond, and Amazon. Wildfire season made worse by historic droughts is hopefully coming to a close in North America, but will return in Australia in a few months. Chemists and chemical engineers that can figure out how to clean polluted water or desalinate ocean water will be essential in helping solve the looming water crisis that the world is currently facing.

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