Better Chemistry Through Innovating
August 19, 2025
You’re probably wearing at least one item of clothing containing nylon, polyester, acrylic, or rayon. These synthetic fibers offer advantages—stretch, durability, moisture-wicking—that natural ones often cannot match. Nylon and its counterparts were developed in the chemical industry’s golden age: the 1920s to 1950s, a period of innovation and growth that produced many of the products—and problems—we live with today.
Since then, the American chemical industry has become a “sleeping dinosaur,” according to Roger Turner, Joel Tickner, and Molly Jacobs. “There is an irony,” they write, “in the fact that an industry that was once an engine of innovation—taking fossilized carbon and turning it into the synthetics saturating today’s world—has become a dinosaur at precisely the moment when it is needed to meet new climate and ecological goals.”
Can innovative polices wake the dinosaur? Turner, Tickner, and Jacobs uncover lessons from the rise and fall of civilian chemistry that can help catalyze a safer and more sustainable industry.