People say “without chemistry,” as if it were possible.
You are made of chemistry. Your blood regulates its own pH with a sophisticated buffer system. Your liver converts alcohol into acetaldehyde and on into acetic acid. Every time you eat bread, a Maillard reaction takes place between amino acids and sugar. When you brew coffee, you extract molecules into hot water. When an orchid blooms, it’s signaling compounds between cells.
That’s chemistry. Those are reactions. You can’t escape it.
Soap is chemistry too. The reaction is called saponification — fat meets lye, the bonds break apart into glycerin and soap molecules. Humans have done it for thousands of years. It IS chemistry. It’s just not industry.
The interesting thing isn’t that people want to avoid “chemistry” — it’s that we can’t agree on what we mean.
One person avoids fabric softener in the dryer, but cleans the kitchen with Ajax. Another buys fragrance-free laundry detergent, but sprays Yves Saint Laurent on their neck. A third reads E-numbers on food, but buys a twenty-two-ingredient shampoo without turning it over. A fourth goes for the Nordic Swan Ecolabel on detergent, but drinks from plastic bottles every day. A fifth filters microplastics out of the facial scrub, but washes polyester clothes three times a week. A sixth won’t have BPA in the water bottle, but buys canned tomatoes that are coated on the inside with exactly that — BPA. A seventh skips the meat, but sleeps on a mattress of polyurethane foam with flame retardants.
We don’t have one picture of what “chemistry” is. We have a feeling. And that feeling is governed more often by advertising than by knowledge.
It’s not “with chemistry” or “without chemistry.” It’s chemistry that has been in circulation for millions of years, versus chemistry that was invented in the last century.
Natural chemistry is not synonymous with harmless. Alcohol is a naturally occurring molecule, and it kills around two thousand five hundred Danes a year. The cyanide in an apple’s seeds would be toxic if you crushed two hundred of them and ate them all at once. Deadly nightshade berries are natural — three to four berries kill a child. Tobacco is a plant; it kills around sixteen thousand Danes a year. Water can drown you.
The difference isn’t whether something is “naturally good” and “industrially evil.” The difference is another one. With natural chemistry, the body, the ecosystems, and the microorganisms have evolutionary experience. That doesn’t mean they’re harmless. It means we have systems to handle them. Industrial chemistry is mostly a few decades old. PFAS is from the nineteen-forties. Most endocrine disruptors are from the postwar era. That’s too short a time for either us or nature to have a plan for it.
Here’s where it gets concrete. Your waterworks is built to remove bacteria and a few natural substances from the groundwater. It’s not built to remove what modern industry has left behind.
Take PFAS. There are over nine thousand different PFAS substances. Activated charcoal catches some, but there exists no single method to remove them all. Danish regions estimate that fifteen thousand sites in Denmark may be contaminated with PFAS that can seep down into the groundwater.
Take pesticides. A mass screening from 2020 found illegal sprays in Danish groundwater. Including amitrole — an endocrine-disrupting weedkiller that is banned in Denmark and yet shows up in measurements above the limit value.
Take pharmaceutical residues. Paracetamol and other medicine residues end up in groundwater via sewage sludge. The waterworks isn’t designed to filter them out.
And take microplastics. Treatment plants remove ninety to ninety-nine percent. That sounds good. On a societal scale it’s still millions of particles a day getting through.
These aren’t conspiracies. They’re the Danish Environmental Protection Agency’s own figures.
Why can’t the systems keep up? There are two reasons.
The first is the pace. Industry makes new molecules faster than we can test them. Regulation typically comes ten to thirty years after a substance is in widespread use. Lead in gasoline was in use for several decades before it was banned. PFAS is still in use.
The second is the cocktail effect. The substances are tested individually. We use them as a mixture. Danish researchers have documented that combinations of medicine residues and PFAS in Danish drinking water can have endocrine-disrupting effects that the individual substances don’t have on their own. It’s the one toxin plus the other toxin plus the third that ends up doing the damage — and that’s not something we measure for.
When I say real soap is chemistry, I’m not lying. Saponification is a chemical reaction. Glycerin is a chemical compound. Soap is chemistry.
It’s just the kind of chemistry that breaks down in nature and the body at roughly the same pace it was made. The kind of chemistry that’s four lines on the back — which you can read yourself.
The difference isn’t “with or without chemistry.” The difference is whether you can understand what it says yourself — or whether you’ve handed it over to marketing.
Sources
- Sundhedsstyrelsen: Alkohol og sygdomme
- Kræftens Bekæmpelse, 2023: Skræmmende tal: Hver tredje dør af rygning
- KemiFOKUS: Amygdalin i æblekerner
- KemiFOKUS: Belladonna, heksekunst og atropin
- Danske Vandværker: Hvorfor kan vi ikke bare rense for PFAS?
- Miljø- og Ligestillingsministeriet, februar 2020: Massescreening viser ulovlige sprøjtemidler i grundvandet
- EWII: Medicinrester i drikkevand kræver handling
- Aktuel Naturvidenskab, 2019: Mikroplast i byens vand
- Altinget Miljø: Forskere: blandingen af medicinrester og PFAS i drikkevandet er en overset og potentielt farlig cocktail