Materials transition emerges as a key frontier in industrial decarbonisation

Net zero discussions have largely focused on energy, but that is only part of the carbon story. A substantial share of fossil fuel use never ends up as combustion at all. Instead, it is turned into the materials that shape daily life: plastics, fertilisers, adhesives, solvents, synthetic fibres and building products. In industrial decarbonisation terms, that makes the “materials transition” just as important as the energy transition.

The chemical sector sits at the centre of this challenge. It consumes a significant share of global oil and gas demand as feedstock rather than fuel, and it supplies the basic inputs for much of the modern economy. Ammonia remains essential for fertiliser production, while ethylene and other petrochemical building blocks underpin a vast range of plastics, coatings and industrial intermediates. As the Royal Society has argued, the issue is not simply how to use less carbon, but how to stop relying on fossil-derived carbon as the default raw material.

Plastics illustrate the scale of the problem. McKinsey estimates that global plastics production accounts for around 400 million metric tonnes of emissions each year, with emissions spread across feedstock production, monomer manufacture and final processing. Yet only a small fraction of plastic waste is recycled, leaving most of it to be landfilled, incinerated or leaked into the environment. That means the carbon locked into these products re-enters the atmosphere quickly or eventually, making plastics both a materials and emissions challenge.

The United States Department of Energy has begun framing the response in terms of “sustainable carbon” rather than simply carbon reduction. Its Clean Fuels & Products Shot aims to develop alternatives that can cut net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 85% by 2035, while reducing dependence on petroleum and other fossil inputs across a chemical system that spans more than 70,000 products. The same logic is increasingly visible in research into carbon dioxide utilisation, including work on using captured CO2 as a feedstock for plastics.

Construction offers a different, and in some respects more promising, pathway. Buildings and infrastructure can store carbon for decades, which means the carbon embodied in materials can remain out of the atmosphere for far longer than in short-lived consumer goods. Timber already demonstrates this principle, but researchers are extending it to engineered materials made from agricultural residues, biochar and carbon-negative or carbon-storing product designs. In these cases, carbon is not treated solely as waste to be eliminated; it becomes part of long-life assets.

That distinction matters because the industrial goal is not to remove carbon from chemistry altogether. Carbon is essential to many products. The real task is to replace fossil carbon with lower-emission alternatives, including biomass-derived inputs, waste biomass and captured carbon dioxide. The Royal Society has described this shift as “defossilisation”, a more accurate term than decarbonisation for sectors that cannot function without carbon atoms in their products.

For industry, though, substitution alone is not enough. Any alternative feedstock has to be assessed across the full life cycle: where it came from, what land-use impacts it carries, how much energy it required to process, how long it remains in use and what happens at end of life. That is especially important because some carbon sources are limited. If biogenic carbon is to be used at scale, decisions will have to be made about which applications deserve priority.

There is also a wider systems question around captured carbon. Some policy debates assume that permanently storing CO2 underground is always the best outcome. But if the aim is a circular carbon economy, then keeping carbon in use for as long as possible may be more valuable than burying it immediately. That means designing products, collection systems and recycling routes that preserve carbon in circulation before any final disposal step.

For industrial decarbonisation professionals, the implications are clear. Progress will depend on materials that perform competitively, secure and transparent supply of alternative carbon, robust life-cycle accounting, supportive policy, and end-of-life infrastructure that is built before volumes scale. It will also require traceability. Labelling, certification and digital product passports are becoming critical tools for proving the origin of carbon in products, and for building trust with buyers who increasingly want evidence, not claims.

The next phase of net zero will not be defined only by cleaner power plants and electrified factories. It will also be shaped by how industry sources, uses, stores and recovers the carbon atoms embedded in the materials on which modern economies depend.