Environmental safety of chemicals has become a global concern

At present, the issue of environmental safety of chemicals has become a global concern. The Party Central Committee and the State Council have attached great importance to chemicals management, and have made systematic deployments for chemicals risk control and the management of new pollutants.

　　At the recently held China Conference on Green and Sustainable Development of Chemicals, Li Shousheng, president of the China Petroleum and Chemical Industry Federation, said that with the mass production and widespread use of chemicals, the environmental risks in many aspects of chemical production, processing, storage, transportation, use, recycling and waste disposal are increasing.

　　"The petrochemical industry is a producer and supplier of chemicals, and upgrading the level of chemical risk prevention and control and green development plays an important role in guaranteeing the high-quality development of upstream and downstream industrial chains." Li Shousheng said.

　　Li Shousheng introduced that there are already 7 million types of chemicals in the world, with more than 70,000 in regular use and more than 1,000 new ones appearing every year. With the continuous increase in the use of chemicals, environmental emergencies triggered by them occur frequently, and the environmental damage and human health problems caused by persistent organic pollutants, endocrine disruptors and other new pollutants are also increasing day by day.

　　At present, the climate, environment and health issues arising from the whole life cycle of chemicals have become the focus of global concern, and chemical safety has also become a regulatory priority for the international community. The formulation and introduction of a series of environmental conventions, such as the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, the Minamata Convention on Mercury, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer and its Kigali Amendment, and the Plastics Convention, reflect the great importance attached by countries around the globe to the environmental management of chemicals. It is also easy to see from the domestic development situation that our government attaches great importance to the regulation of chemicals and the governance of new pollutants, and will lead the global environmental governance.2022 The State Council issued the Action Program for the Governance of New Pollutants, which puts forward that the production and use of toxic and hazardous chemical substances are the main sources of new pollutants, and that the concept of environmental risk management of the whole life cycle should be followed to promote the environmental risk management of new pollutants in a coordinated manner.

　　"China is the world's major country in the production and consumption of petroleum and chemical products, but 'big but not strong' is still the status quo faced by China's petroleum and chemical industry, the current level of green development in China as a whole is not high enough, the foundation is still relatively weak, the industrial structure of high-energy consumption, high-carbon emission characteristics are still obvious, constraints on China's Petroleum and chemical industry safety, green, low-carbon development issues remain prominent." Li Shousheng said, in today's world unprecedented big changes accelerate the evolution of the petrochemical industry chain supply chain to accelerate the reconstruction of the background, to promote the green transformation of economic development has become a global consensus, countries around the world are actively exploring new paths to sustainable development, a new system. In this context, green chemistry is becoming an important emerging field for the global energy and chemical industry to realize industrial revolution and competition.

　　Li Shousheng suggests that the whole industry should do a good job of "five" to promote sustainable development: first, to promote the transformation and upgrading of high-end development; second, to reduce or eliminate environmental pollution by cleaner production; third, to promote the energy revolution by low-carbon transformation; fourth, to achieve resource conservation by recycling transformation; and fifth, to lead the high-quality development by digital transformation.