Why This Is Important

An introduction of sorts

Hey You,

Thank you for being here. It means a lot. I never expected to actually get this far or reach this many people when I started writing back in September 2020. I’ve grown a lot as a writer, hopefully as a person, and I hope it shows here for those who have been here since the beginning. This newsletter was born through a deep frustration with the industry I had sought to make better as a polymer chemist. At first, I thought it was maybe the company I had worked at (starting in 2016) because it was too big, owned by private equity, and just didn’t have the time to get out of its own way despite some really great talent across the entire organization. The immense lack of instability (the R&D facility I had worked at would close in 2022) made me decide to leave and move down the supply chain to a family run company that was a fraction of the size, and it was further down the supply chain compared to the world’s largest producer of formaldehyde. Instead, I saw different problems that felt in some ways worse so then I jumped again even further down the supply chain to a construction products maker who was somewhere in the middle with respect to size but had incredible gross margins and it still somehow had all of the problems of both my prior employers. I think I got a bit burned out (even though I was maybe in denial about it being me).

A random attempt at seeing how an old coworker was doing on LinkedIn started a process I had never anticipated. I ended up at the FDA as a reviewer of medical devices in July 2022. I’m now writing about the chemical industry less from a position of anger and frustration and more from a position of an amused observer.

Without anger or frustration fueling my writing the only reason I’ve kept up with writing at all is because I think that this industry is important because it touches almost every aspect of our material world, and most people don’t really think about it at all. In reality, the chemical industry is one of the most important sectors of the United States economy and is a keystone to a “modern” or “first world” economy. Here is the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) overview of the chemical industry and it’s a bit dated:

Figure adapted from CISA

The overall revenues and values of the chemical industry are a bit dated, but here is the American Chemistry Council’s numbers if you want to double check. The overall percentages are about the same and stay fixed. In short, the industry represents about 25% of gross domestic product, 96% of goods in the US is produced from domestically manufactured chemicals, the industry employs about 529k people and supports about 4.1 million jobs. Chemicals also makes up about 10% of US exports too. A reader framed it nicely as, “the chemical industry is a base layer of the civilization stack.” Just about every society utilizes chemistry in some way and some of the key differentiators of how we view the advancement of a society is the sophistication of the chemistry that they can produce.

My position is that polymer chemistry was the foundation of what we consider to be “modern” society and it really took off in the early 1900s with Bakelite or phenolic resins and then we really hit the accelerator with polyethylene and nylon. These modern synthetic materials would shape how we do just about everything. Without polyethylene the Allies in World War II would still be using gutta percha (natural rubber and also a polymer) to insulate their cables and would be dealing with high capacitance (noise) and ultimately less effective communication. We also use synthetic polymers in modern fiber optic cable jacketing (how Verizon Fios delivers high speed internet to me) to protect the fragile glass filament and cladding. We also still use synthetic polymers like polyethylene to insulate the cables that stretch out under the ocean. We just have a lot more of them.

Via Wikimedia

Every post of this newsletter cannot be me explaining fiber optic cables and synthetic polymers though. This is telling you how the world works, and Wikipedia, the Smithsonian, or some other newsletter writers could do better job than me. I’m more interested in where we are now and where we could be going in the future and why what we have now feels fundamentally broken (see my issues with burn out above). If the US chemical industry represents a significant portion of the US economy—then what would happen if this industry were to grow instead of seemingly spiral a slow death overseen by private equity firms like Apollo, Carlyle, SK Capital, and Blackstone?

Getting the type of growth, we saw springing out of the Great Depression in the 1930s (start of the thermoplastic revolution) is unlikely to happen again in the same way and it was in part due to innovations from companies like Bakelite, Goodyear, ICI, DuPont, and Eastman. That sort of revolution was driven by adopting modern materials to replace things like metal, glass, and wood and other technical innovations like taking pictures and capturing movies on films. The use of “film” was driven by innovations in polymer chemistry such as cellulose nitrate (also used for ammunition/explosives in WWII) and the less dangerous cellulose acetate (both were early synthetic polymers made from natural polymers). The use of cellulose nitrate is fascinating, and its use was actually somewhat well documented in the Quentin Tarantino movie, “Inglorious Bastards.” But I digress.

To me, plastics and polymer chemistry and synonymous with modernity and our adoption of these materials and the resulting effects both positive and negative can be debated can be debated ad nauseum by other people. I would just add that our massive steel bridges are inhibited from corroding into iron oxide by using anticorrosion coatings based on alkyds, epoxy resins, and polyurethanes. Once again, this is kind of old news, and if we want substantial change for anything better, I think we need growth and adoption of new materials. We could move away from the things we consider bad such as things that might cause cancer, disrupt endocrine systems, and destroy wildlife habitat when released into the environment. Additionally, our current system of chemicals being derived from petroleum with high energy costs contributes significantly to overall air pollution during the production of chemicals before they are ever implemented in their final form. We could move towards things we consider (and I hope test/prove) to be better and I think the way forward is innovation. I guess this makes me a techno optimist in some way, but I don’t know if I fit that well with the other techno-optimists out there.

We cannot get a better future through technical innovation alone and any new product or start-up seeking to commercialize a new technology needs to navigate a competitive incumbent industry environment with significant regulatory hurdles. Being able to provide a marginally better product at a marginally higher price will not result in the types of growth we expect from technical innovation. I tell you this from my first-hand experience at doing marginal innovation at a marginal price markup and large innovations with marginal price markups. In both situations the reality of commercialization was difficult not just with customers, but internal stakeholders being willing to support the project.

This means I like to try and describe some of the fundamental issues with the chemical industry right now and how those issues magnify out to things that a regular person might experience. A great example is feedstock flexibility around crude oil. We are one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of crude oil and therefore we are also really good at refinement and downstream production (chemicals). Problem with crude oil and natural gas would be the whole global warming thing (hopefully most of you are with it on this), but also if we were to ever run out or the cost to extract/refine goes up too much then there is no readily available alternative.

How I Pick Topics

I admit that I’m a bit capricious when I write about specific topics. It’s also hard for me to write everything above every single time I write so I need to just assume you are somewhat aware of this stuff if you are here. My topic selection is a bit random, but it all serves a purpose to figure out how to make everything I described above a bit better.

The broadness of the industry coupled with my interests in different stuff means this newsletter tends to wander off the beaten path of “polymer chemistry.” I’ll write about how artificial intelligence is going to help chemists one week, then about immobilized enzymes as catalysts and opening up new markets, then about microplastics in our bodies, and then about product development in chemicals. I think this is because the chemical industry, as a whole, touches every single part of our life and it doesn’t care if we like it or not. It’s just how life is right now and no amount of boycotting or selective buying of “sustainable” products will influence the direction of the industry too much (I’ll explain this later, but you have to read and find out).

These topics are all fundamentally connected through either synthetic polymer chemistry such as plastics, adhesives, sealants, foams, textiles, and food contacting materials or natural polymer chemistry such as cellulose, lignin, enzymes, and other proteins (don’t sleep on keratin). Sometimes, those two worlds collide in companies like MetGen who have engineered enzymes to break down lignin. This also means the audience is very heterogenous and it is comprised of industry insiders such as chemists, engineers, sales and marketing professionals, investors, and industry outsiders that just want to get a better understanding of an opaque industry that has a significant impact on our modern life.

If you are reading this then I hope you get the following from the newsletter

1. Explain how the world of chemicals works now and highlight fundamental societal problems and problems with the incumbents. Hopefully you are just more informed about the material world by being here.

2. Show how start-ups are trying to move us forward and the challenges I think they will face to become successful.

3. Trying to help chemists or aspiring chemists to be better or to have hope.

4. Lecturing start-up founders on what I think they are doing wrong and why they need to get it together.

Another good place to start reading this newsletter is my annual letter (I just started doing that in 2023) where I try and bring all the recent writing together in one post. I hope you stick around and find something useful here. The most flattering thing is when people share something they like and tag me or reference me in a peer reviewed journal article.

Tony

I’ll pin this post to the “front page” of the website and it will be the new welcome email that I send out to new subscribers.