Number of industrial chemicals being produced globally grossly underestimated

A new analysis has revealed that up to three times as many chemicals are manufactured globally than previously thought. More than a third of these substances cannot be explicitly identified for intellectual property reasons or because of their chemical complexity. The international team of researchers aimed to shed light on sources of chemical pollution by scrutinising all publicly available national and regional inventories of industrial chemicals. They found more than 350,000 chemicals are registered for production and use, almost triple that estimated by earlier surveys. Previous estimates of the number of chemicals in production have focused on Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, particularly in North American and western Europe. The new survey includes data from a wider range of countries – including China, which today accounts for around 37% of global production.