CHEM Trust & the Savitri Trust
A small group of nonprofit organisations are working to combat the harmful effects of toxic chemical pollution on our health and environment, and philanthropy is playing a vital role in supporting them.
(Image credit: Felton Davis, CC BY 2.0 license)
Since the early 20th century, we have seen many examples of synthetic products once hailed as miraculous, that over time we came to realize had a much darker side. Some of these — asbestos, thalidomide, DDT or CFCs — have become by-words for harm to people and the environment. But what about the potentially harmful products whose names we don’t yet know: could these be the asbestos or CFCs of the future? And what long-term harms might we be storing up by failing to take action?
These are the sorts of questions underpinning the work of CHEM Trust – one of a handful of charities in the UK addressing the issue of harmful chemicals. Over the last 20 years, the organization has worked hard to develop protective chemicals policy, based on peer reviewed research on harmful chemicals to ensure this informs policymaking in the UK across Europe and globally. CHEM Trust has also worked alongside partner organisations such as ClientEarth to support legal actions and court cases against companies which contravene existing rules on the use of harmful chemicals.
The impact of harmful chemicals on the environment and human health is huge. It includes negative effects on children’s neurological development, reductions in male fertility and increases in breast cancer; as well as adverse effects on animal populations - from orcas and otters to frogs and snails. And some of these effects are extremely long-lasting: one class of chemicals that CHEM Trust has campaigned on for many years, for example, is per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which are often known as “forever chemicals”, because they barely degrade in the natural environment even after very long periods of time.
Despite the wide-ranging nature of the impact, however, work to address harmful chemicals has consistently received little support or funding. Environmental causes in total receive around 8.5% of the funding from UK foundations and lotteries, but grants towards supporting work on toxics and pollution make up only 0.3% of that. In part this may be because the work is just difficult. It can demand a high level of technical knowledge and expertise to grasp the issues; change takes a long time and may feel maddeningly slow; and the charities and nonprofit organisations working in the field will often find themselves pitted against powerful and well-resourced corporate interests.
There are philanthropic funders who are willing to take on these challenges, however, and the support they offer is vital. CHEM Trust’s founder and current Director of Fundraising, Elizabeth Salter Green, points out that the charity doesn’t receive any statutory funding, so its work and success over the past two decades “has been possible in large part because we have long-term funders who understand that policy change in the field of endocrine disrupting chemicals takes a long time.”
One of these funders is the Savitri Trust – a family foundation established by the successful entrepreneur and restauranteur Arjun Waney in 2001. His daughter, Devika Waney Mokhtarzadeh, was a founding Trustee of the organisation and for many years played a key role in shaping and leading its work. In 2017, Devika’s own experience with breast cancer led her to reconnect with nature, and to realise that if the Savitri Trust wanted to deliver on its mission of supporting human health and wellbeing, the organisation also needed to take into account environmental health and well-being, since the two are inextricably linked. As a result, the trust expanded from its previous focus on the health and livelihood of poor and marginalised communities in India to a broader focus that includes the health of the environment.
As part of this evolution in strategy, Savitri Trust joined the Environmental Funders Network (EFN), in the hope of meeting other like-minded foundations and learning more about the issues. It was through conversations with other EFN members that Devika became aware of toxic chemicals as an issue. She quickly realised that this was relevant both to Savitri’s existing interests in human health and wellbeing and to its new interests in the environment. Added to which (as we have already seen), it is an issue that is chronically underfunded, so there was an opportunity to have a real impact with relatively small amounts of money
Savitri trust started supporting CHEM Trust in 2021, with unrestricted, multi-year funding. Part of the appeal was that CHEM Trust was addressing things at an upstream level – focusing on research and policy work to drive changes in the law – which fit in with Savitri Trust’s own desire to move away from only funding service delivery and direct interventions towards funding systemic change.
The issues on which CHEM Trust works are, by their nature, often very long-term, so it can take a long time for the impact to become apparent. However, there have been notable successes along the way. In 2018, CHEM Trust’s ‘Toxic Soup’ report put forward the idea of ‘Grouping’: banning whole groups of chemicals rather than doing it on an individual basis, which can save decades of risk assessments and stop harmful exposure much sooner. This has helped to influence the thinking of several public authorities, and in 2025 the European Chemicals Agency used a grouping approach to ban a class of chemicals known as bisphenols In food packaging. 2025 also saw the EU issue an update to toy safety rules in order to ban various hazardous chemicals in children’s toys, including hormone or endocrine disrupting chemicals, which was informed by more than a decade of work CHEM Trust and others had done on this issue.
Sadly, Devika Waney Mokhtarzadeh passed away in 2024, so she was not able to see some of the impact that Savitri Trust’s support for CHEM Trust has had. Savitri has vowed to continue the spirit of her work and is committed to carrying on its support for efforts to combat harmful chemicals. Given the scale of the challenges, however, more philanthropic funding in this area will undoubtedly be needed.
Awareness of harmful chemicals as an issue among the public seems to be increasing, thanks to stories about water pollution and the unseen effects of plastic usage, which may bring CHEM Trust and others hope that more philanthropic funders will start to pay attention as well. As Devika herself once wrote, "Hope, love of beauty, and the perfection of the natural world are the drivers for me. We all have different reasons, but hope is the positive outcome. What more can we claim than that?"
