Tackling Toxins: Insights from Case Studies of Pollutants, Regulation, and Industrial Change

Through what processes can environmentally damaging industries be shifted to greener paths? When regulators confront environmentally damaging substances and production processes, what kinds of reforms tend to follow? To what extent can large, powerful firms simply resist regulatory intrusions? While these questions have been central to regulatory research for decades, they have become increasingly important as more scholars have begun to confront global environmental problems, including climate change. As climate change-related impacts and disasters grow ever worse, social scientists are accelerating their efforts. As scholars race to address the climate crisis, they have often treated the problem as sui generis and have only rarely sought to learn from prior efforts to make industrial operations greener. In this paper, we consider what can be learned from other shifts away from polluting substances. Drawing on literatures on corporate regulatory strategies and evolving regulatory interactions, we argue for a focus on configurations of regulatory scrutiny and industrial reform, which we then consider through case studies of several major industrial pollutants. We consider the phaseout of ozone-depleting substances, which has often been cited as a model for mitigating climate change, plus three other cases: PFAS, leaded fuel, and mercury. We highlight four configurations of regulatory scrutiny and industrial reform: (1) Progressive substitution (of ozone-depleting substances); (2) regrettable substitution (in the first waves of PFAS regulation); (3) knock-on substitution (in the phaseout of leaded fuel); and (4) selective substitution (in the case of mercury). These variable configurations, and the processes that generated them, provide novel lenses for understanding climate mitigation and confronting obstructionism. Our paper is premised on the reality and significance of existing environmental improvements like those above, but also the recognition that improvement has been highly uneven or elusive in some cases. We pay attention to firms’ strategic positions and adaptations to regulation, to regulators’ standards and innovation-forcing capacities, and most importantly, to the interaction of the two. Like other attempts to foreground regulatory interactions, we are interested in the interplay of conflict and cooperation and the evolution of particular governance spheres over time.