You can be forgiven for not having heard of the European Commission’s Critical Chemicals Alliance. Launched in January this year, this opaque process could have been an opportunity to tackle the chemicals industry’s impact on the chemical pollution and climate crises. But instead, as a new report by Corporate Europe Observatory and the European Environmental Bureau makes clear, it looks set to pump public policy and funding towards business-as-usual for one of the most powerful lobby sectors in Brussels.
The chemicals industry, including producers of fossil-based petrochemicals and plastics, is at the nexus of the chemical pollution and climate crises. It is the producer of harmful chemicals and plastics, including so-called PFAS ‘forever chemicals’ which can be found in the blood of nearly all EU citizens, including politicians. And it is also a huge consumer of fossil fuels. These fossil fuels are used as both the energy source for chemicals production and the feedstock for it, and need to be urgently phased out as far as possible.
But this industry is also one of the most powerful lobbies operating in Brussels today. Its so-called Antwerp Declaration has helped set the agenda for the second von der Leyen Commission and its main trade association, CEFIC (the European Chemical Industry Council), is the highest-declaring spender of all lobbies listed in the EU lobby transparency register.
So perhaps we should not be surprised that an EU process, the Critical Chemicals Alliance, tasked with identifying which chemical molecules and production sites are considered “critical” for Europe’s economy and therefore ‘deserving’ of public policy and funding, looks set to end up supporting the incumbent chemicals industry and its current production lines.
When European Commission Vice-president Stéphane Séjourné launched the Critical Chemicals Alliance in January 2026 it followed several years of lobbying on the idea by member state governments, with France in the lead, and from industry. And it did not take long before it was clear from the remit, structure, and governance of the Alliance that it would be operating with the existing industry’s short-term interests at its core. As the report shows, big corporate lobby groups such as CEFIC and Plastics Europe have seats on the Alliance’s Steering Board; industry holds 4 of the 8 leadership positions within the working groups which drive the day-to-day work of the Alliance; and industry has an in-built majority, outnumbering civil society voices 16:1 in the Alliance’s overall membership.
The EEB can testify to this industry dominance, as a civil society member of the Alliance. Our report details how civil society has been excluded from key leadership positions, have found it hard to access relevant documents before meetings, and have felt marginalised throughout. They are also very worried about the likely outcomes of the process. NGOs have formally complained to the Commission about many of these concerns, but to date, little has changed and no written reply has been received.
This structural corporate dominance is echoed in the policy direction and work of the Alliance too. The need to reduce production and use of harmful chemicals – detoxification – is completely absent from the Critical Chemicals Alliance. Shockingly some of the chemical substances which are being lined up to receive a “critical” label are petrochemicals, and / or chemicals strongly linked to blood cancer, used to produce the environmentally-hazardous polystyrene or the problematic PVC, or are precursors to PFAS. Moreover some of these substances have been prioritised for regulation under REACH chemicals rules. Chemicals producers are using this process to try to ensure that their own production is labelled “critical”, no matter the health or environmental harm caused.
Meanwhile the Alliance is promoting ‘false solutions’ to the climate crisis such as chemical recycling, and fossil-based hydrogen, which will not make inroads into the sector’s fossil fuel use. And with 40 per cent of EU plastics going into packaging, it’s incredible that this process might lead to more production, rather than less.
Instead of this industry-led approach, civil society has been urging the Commission to redefine “critical” chemicals as those essential to meet society’s needs. This would create space for the detoxification and defossilisation of the chemicals sector. But to deliver this it would be vital that no public funding is awarded without stringent conditionalities to tackle the climate and pollution crises.
It’s time for the European Commission and member states to stand up to the power of the chemicals sector, and create an industrial policy which leads to safer and healthier environments for citizens and workers, and cleaner and greener chemicals.
