Green chemistry and focus

Are chemicals playing a role in our collective attention crisis?

Attention is a big topic for me these days. As I juggle the multiple demands of running a business, I’ve found my time for quality, focused work slowly eroded by the steady drip (and sometimes deluge) of meetings, emails, admin, and the dozens of miscellaneous urgent tasks that pop up on a daily basis. Some days I feel like I’m running on a hamster wheel, working harder than ever but getting less accomplished.

So as I took a few weeks off over the holiday, I took the opportunity to read Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari. I was hoping to gain a better understanding of what was going on in my brain, and how to adopt habits that could improve my productivity. I did find that, but more importantly, I found a broadening of perspective. Hari argues, quite convincingly, that loss of focus is a societal problem, and needs to be addressed at a societal level.

“Democracy requires the ability of a population to pay attention long enough to identify real problems, distinguish them from fantasies, come up with solutions, and hold their leaders accountable if they fail to deliver them.”

—Johann Kari, Stolen Focus

I highly recommend reading the whole book, as Hari takes a thorough journalistic approach to interviewing experts, presenting evidence, and identifying areas of uncertainty. If you don’t have the attention span for that, try this excerpt on for size.

For the purposes of this newsletter, I’m focusing on the intersection of chemicals and focus.

What do chemicals have to do with attention?

Even if you’re not hanging out with toxicologists at your work events, you’re likely aware that exposure to chemicals can be bad for you. From the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, there’s been a growing body of research discovering one horrifying impact of the chemical boom after another. Cancer, breathing problems, developmental effects, and plain old regular toxicity are fairly well-known. Now we’re seeing increasing evidence of more insidious effects, including micro- and nanoplastics crossing the blood-brain barrier and messing with our brains.

So it’s entirely possible that the high chemical burden we’re exposed to as a population has some impact on our attention spans. In Stolen Focus, Hari interviews Professor Barbara Demeneix, an award-winning French biologist who has written two books on the impacts of pollution on our brains (they’re now next on my Depressing Reads list). She believes that chemical pollutants are a factor in the boom of neurodevelopmental disease, including ADHD.

“At every stage of your life, different forms of pollution will affect your attention span… [we are now surrounded by so many pollutants that] there is no way we can have a normal brain today.”

—Prof. Barbara Demeneix, Stolen Focus

We’re surrounded by synthetic chemicals. Pesticides, plasticisers, flame retardants, surfactants, and even UV filters (from sunscreen) have made their way into human bloodstreams, and from there into amniotic fluid, affecting brain development at the earliest stages. Early chemical exposures have been shown to be linked to a wide range of neurodevelopmental disorders, and even “more subtle deficits, such as slightly lowered IQ and subclinical learning or attention problems,” as Rauh and Margolis state in their 2016 research review.

While children’s small, developing brains and immature metabolic pathways are particularly vulnerable to chemical pollution, it’s hard to believe that there isn’t also some effect on the adult brain. Teasing out the exact impact is challenging, but both common sense and emerging research tell us that we’d all be better off with safer chemistry.

A growing and disproportionate burden

Projections agree that our use of chemicals is going to increase rather dramatically over the next few decades, and most of that burden is going to go to non-OECD countries.

That’s a crucial part of this puzzle—disproportionate impact. If you’re fortunate enough to live in a lovely tree-lined neighbourhood, far away from factories, on a street with low traffic, in a house with lead-free paint and pipes, your exposure to chemical pollution will be fairly low. But if you live in a low-income neighbourhood next to a chemical plant, in rented accommodation with lead paint, and work in a nail salon or on a farm, the picture is quite different.

On top of that, disadvantaged populations tend to live more stressful lives, which makes the problem measurably worse. Or in academic speak,

“…the neuropsychological effects of toxic exposures are likely amplified by psychosocial adversity both in utero and during early development. This further increases the risk disparity among different groups of children, because disadvantaged populations with disproportionate chemical exposures are also more likely to experience a range of potentially stressful living conditions, including substandard housing, poor nutrition, neighborhood crime, and inadequate health care.”

—Rauh and Margolis, 2016

This “toxic stress” puts a further burden on the brain and body, making humans less resilient and more likely to experience adverse effects.

So, as Hari points out, if we leave the problem of chemical pollution and shrinking attention to be dealt with by individuals, we are creating a stratified society. There will be (and already is) an upper class of privileged people with the time, money, and energy to eat fresh organic produce, buy all-natural wooden toys, live out in the (somewhat) unpolluted countryside, and think deeply about philosophy and politics. Everybody else will be stuck with convenience food, chemical pollution, and a strong deficit of attention.

Not only is that morally wrong and depressing, but it’s not good enough for the crises that we’re facing today. We urgently need the full richness and talent of humanity at its best to build a better future for us all.

Dealing with the chemical burden

This is where green chemistry comes in. There’s a principle called the Precautionary Principle, which can concisely be defined as “better safe than sorry.” If you don’t know for sure that a chemical is safe, don’t use it. This is exactly what Barbara Demeneix recommends for dealing with chemical pollution:

“Basically, we should treat new chemicals, new pollutants, as though they are like drugs. The chemical should have to be tested for safety before it starts being used by ordinary people and only if it passes stringent tests should it end up in your home and in your bloodstream.

—Prof. Barbara Demeneix, Stolen Focus

It’s important to add my favourite caveat here: going chemical-free is not the answer. First off, everything is a chemical, even water, so “chemical-free” is a nonsense term. Second, chemicals have enabled huge improvements in sanitation and food preservation, reducing our biological stressors in many ways. Chemicals are also a critical part of the future sustainable economy, with polymers and advanced materials enabling a higher standard of living with lower energy use around the world. Cancelling chemicals would take us back to an age that we do not want to revisit.

However, we do need to put better guardrails around our use of chemicals. Regulation currently lags well behind scientific understanding, partly due to strong resistance from actors with economic interests in lax regulation (i.e. the chemical industry). We don’t have anywhere near enough data about chemicals already in use. An EEA report from 2020 puts our knowledge about chemicals into stark perspective:

The graphic above shows that there are about 70,000 chemicals on the market that are poorly characterised; that is, we don’t know much about their hazards at all. We’re just blindly using them. So not only do we need to thoroughly assess new chemicals that are coming onto the market, we need to go back and examine the ones we are already using.

We also need to go back to the fundamentals of “reduce, reuse, recycle” and consider whether we’re using more chemicals than are needed, and how we can prolong their useful lifespan and circularise the end-of-life.

Moving in the right direction

This is obviously not a simple undertaking. Despite the fact that EU REACH is widely considered to be quite a strict piece of chemical legislation, it doesn’t go far enough. We need more ambitious regulations that protect us all from harmful chemicals, regardless of whether we have the time to read ingredients lists.

The EU SSbD framework is a step in the right direction, with the goal being to make sure that all chemicals on the market are both safe and sustainable. However, it’s got some major questions that need to be answered before it’s fully usable, like how to weigh trade-offs between safety and sustainability. And right now it’s completely voluntary, though it’s getting a lot of interest from industry, which is a good sign.

On the flip side, REACH is a major stumbling block for chemical scale-up. Getting a chemical REACH registered at the lowest tonnage (1-10 tonnes per year) can cost as much as €100,000, and the highest tonnage (>1,000 tonnes per year) can run into the millions. When we need new safe and sustainable chemicals to come onto the market quickly, this is too big of a barrier. Adding further data requirements could make it even harder for start-ups to get their chemicals to market.

So we need more data and stricter regulations, but also reduced barriers for new safe entrants. I think there’s a few approaches that can help:

1. Computationally-powered safety testing at early stages
   AI is proving to be transformative in many fields, and toxicology is no exception. Creating algorithms that can accurately predict toxicity and developmental effects of chemicals in silico is a crucial part of the chemical safety puzzle. Obviously this needs to be done very carefully, but if we could reduce or eliminate lab and animal testing, costs for safety data would plummet.

2. More funding and support to help safe chemicals enter the market
   Right now, there’s not much help for scale-ups trying to get their chemical registered under REACH. The typical approach is to find a bigger partner, or form a large consortium, which can be slow and full of pitfalls. What if there was a pot of funding available to chemical start-ups with safer materials? Or a government-funded regulatory centre to do the safety testing at low costs?

3. Creating confidence for investors with long-term sustainable chemical policies
   Right now, petrochemical giants and other investors are hesitant to forge forward with safer, bio-based chemicals. They think there’s a lot more money to be made in pushing more petrochemicals, especially as demand for fossil fuels drops and they need their refineries to produce something. If governments were to make bold, long-term (10+ years) policies that penalised unsafe chemistry, or rewarded safe chemistry, investing in safe chemicals would start to look a lot more attractive.

4. Using UK REACH as a force for good
   The UK left the EU with the stated goal of adopting policies that work for the UK. Can we use the flexibility to experiment with regulatory approaches that support safer chemistry? What if we made the UK more attractive to companies developing safer chemicals?

What else can be done? Any ideas?