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PERFLUOROOCTANESULFONIC ACID might not roll off your tongue, but you almost undoubtedly have some of it inside you. Once widely used as a water-repellent coating for clothing and fabrics, “PFOS” is now notorious as a non-biodegrading “forever chemical” that builds up in the environment, our water supply and eventually us.

The world is finally coming to terms with the legacy of our indiscriminate development and use of chemicals over the past half-century and more. Last year, the UN declared chemical pollution a third great planetary crisis, alongside climate change and biodiversity loss.

These are welcome developments, as are earlier steps, such as the agreement in 2001 of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants and subsequent actions to expand its scope, under which many of the most harmful environmental chemicals, among them PFOS, are now targeted for elimination.

“We should be wary of throwing away the chemical baby with the polluted bathwater”

For many, “chemistry” and “chemicals” have themselves become dirty words. According to Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks words in published materials, use of “chemophobia” was falling sharply until 2011, but has since been creeping upwards again.

Yet chemistry has been good to us, paving the way for everything from life-saving drugs to invaluable technologies such as touchscreens. Today, it is also helping to clean up the environment, for example by developing liquid solvents to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, a crucial part of our quest to hit net-zero emissions.

As our report on seven particularly future-facing chemical innovations makes plain, chemistry has plenty more green potential, too, for instance through creating less environmentally damaging batteries and harnessing the power of photosynthesis to boost the clean-energy transition, or righting the wrong of persistent plastic pollution by developing infinitely recyclable polymers.

So we should be wary of throwing away the chemical baby with the polluted bathwater. Chemistry has all too often been part of the problem – but used right, it can be part of the solution, too.