Toxic chemicals that are routinely released to our environment pose a greater threat to human health and the planet than previously understood. The influential Planetary Boundaries Study by the Stockholm Resilience Institute recently published its conclusion that chemical pollution has crossed a “planetary boundary” by larger margins than climate/energy, rivaling the urgency of climate change due to its potential for irreversible impacts on Earth’s ecological and human health. Marginalized communities bear a disproportionate burden of the environmental and health risks due to the unequal distribution of chemical pollutants, exacerbating environmental inequalities and health disparities. However, no one is untouched.

A planetary boundary is defined as the point at which human-made changes to the Earth push it outside the stable environment of the last 10,000 years. Chemical pollution, called “novel entities” in the study, encompasses man-made materials and chemicals, such as plastics and pollutants, whose unchecked production and release touches virtually every corner of the earth.

A key finding of the study is that annual production and release of chemical pollution outpace global capacity for safety assessment and monitoring. In other words, runaway chemical pollution is fundamentally a systems problem, chemicals are approved for use before they are fully assessed for health and environmental impacts. This problem will grow as population, urbanization and economic growth are expected double the global chemicals industry to $10 trillion by 2030.

The Safer Chemistry Impact Fund is addressing this problem by scaling a hazard-based approach to rapid identification and elimination of the most deleterious substances from manufacturing and distribution, while providing broad access to safer alternatives verified using standardized data and assessment methods.