Written by Cynthia Ene
Earlier this year, many Black households received deeply troubling news. Researchers tested 43 hair-extension products, the braids and bundles many of us and our loved ones have worn since childhood, and found hazardous chemicals in 41 of them. Forty-one out of forty-three. Let that sink in. Consumer Reports found lead and carcinogenic chemicals in 29 synthetic hair brands widely used by Black women, raising concerns about potential cancer, reproductive, and hormonal health effects.
This is not a niche concern. According to Fortune Business Insights, hair extensions are a roughly U.S. $3 billion global market, and more than 70% of Black women say they have worn them in the past year. But look closer at who owns that economy. The Black community is overwhelmingly always just the consumer. We are far less often the manufacturers, formulators, brand owners, or investors deciding what goes into the product. That imbalance matters. When the people most exposed to a product are not the people making it, testing it, regulating it, or profiting from it, safety can become someone else’s afterthought.
Asbestos was once a miracle material. Lead was once in our paint. Every generation seems to discover, too late, that something it trusted was quietly harming it. This poses a question for our community: will we always be the ones who find out last? Or can we start asking, earlier and louder, what our products are made of?
That question is at the center of how I think about the future of manufacturing. Today, the conversation is almost entirely about location: reshoring, tariffs, where the factory sits. Those things matter. But as a licensed professional engineer and chemical engineer, I believe we are missing the more important question: not only where products are made, but what they’re made from.
Most of what surrounds us begins as petroleum: the foam in your mattress and sofa, the coatings on your walls, parts of your car, even the personal care products you use on your most intimate skin. Those same materials can start with plants. At COROL, the company I founded, renewable plant oils become bio-based polyols, the building blocks behind the foams, coatings, and adhesives found in everyday life.
The International Energy Agency projects that petrochemicals will drive more than a third of global oil demand growth through 2030, ahead of cars, trucks, and planes. We can build every factory across the country and still be tied to volatile oil markets and the geopolitics that come with them.
That is a supply-security problem and a carbon problem. Every oil price shock flows straight into the cost of the materials manufacturers rely on, and the carbon footprint of what we buy grows as petrochemical demand rises. Renewable, locally sourced inputs won’t solve every problem inside a product, but they can make the supply chains behind it more secure and far less carbon-intensive.
Here is what leaders are overlooking. North America already produces renewable resources that can become a new generation of materials. Plant oils, including soybean and canola oil, can be converted into polyols and other building blocks that replace petroleum-derived inputs in foams, coatings, adhesives and more.
Yet, we continue to treat these resources largely as raw commodities for export, while trade disputes repeatedly expose the fragility of that model. In 2025, U.S. soybean farmers saw China suspend purchases amid escalating trade tensions. North of the border, Canadian canola oil remains subject to a 100% tariff in China.Turning more of these resources into high-value materials at home would keep value in rural economies, shorten supply chains, cut carbon, and reduce our demand for petrochemicals.
Then there is also the question of who gets to build this future. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Black-owned firms make up just 3.4% of U.S. employer businesses. Brookings reports that it’s only 0.3% in machinery manufacturing. Black consumers are too often the ones exposed to harmful products. We rarely decide what goes into them. That has to change.
Policymakers on both sides of the border should treat renewable, bio-based feedstocks as strategic manufacturing resources and fund the pilot-scale infrastructure that moves new materials from lab to market.
Manufacturers should ask suppliers what is in their inputs and where they come from, and start piloting
bio-based alternatives now. Investors should back hard-tech founders, including Black scientists and engineers, with the patient capital industrial innovation requires. And our community should demand better from the start, not only after the damage is done.For me, this is about legacy. I want our children to be the scientists, engineers, and founders who build the world they want to live in. At COROL, we are turning plant oils into bio-based polyols for foams, coatings, adhesives, and other everyday products. Our communities should not only consume products; we should help create them, test them, own them, and set the standards they must meet.
Cynthia Ene is founder and CEO of COROL, a sustainable chemistry company that develops high-performance, plant-derived bio-polyols to replace petroleum-based chemicals and reduce industrial carbon footprints.