The chemical industry consists of diverse chemical manufacturing companies, including contract chemical manufacturers that convert industrial chemicals into finished product or other materials for end usefor other companies. They play a central role to the modern global economy as they help convert many chemicals and raw materials including oil, air, water, minerals, and metals into thousands of different and extremely useful products used by other industries. Chemical manufacturing also has some overlap with plastic manufacturing as different chemical companies also produce plastic alongside the main chemicals that they handle.

Contract chemical manufacturing is a unique business model for chemical manufacturers. Also referred to as toll manufacturing, contract chemical manufacturing is specifically designed to provide support to other businesses wanting to avoid an increase in their own cost structure by outsourcing chemical production, as one example. Thereare several other justifications of why outsourcing is strategic; Capital investment avoidance, Internal distraction from other strategic objectives, not a core competency, etc. Partnering with contract chemical manufacturers like Echemi allow these businesses to avoid the additional cost and work put into setting up their own chemical production facility as well as the burden of compliance and other regulatory concerns.
The way that contract chemical manufacturing companies work is a lot like other outsourced tasks. Contract chemical manufacturers are fully equipped not only with properfacilities for efficiencyimprovements, but also with highly trained and qualified staff capable of handling hazardous chemicalsand management ofsophisticated chemical manufacturing processes and tasks. They make sure that the correct processes are definedand are followed in detail to make sure that product quality remains consistent throughout every step of the process.
For 2022, more facilities reported to TRI from the chemical manufacturing sector than from any other industry sector (3,430 facilities; 16% of all facilities that reported to TRI for 2022). This sector reported 54% of all waste managed, more than any other sector.

This large and diverse sector includes facilities producing basic chemicals and those that manufacture products through further processing of chemicals. The chart below shows the number of facilities by chemical manufacturing subsectors that reported to TRI for 2022.
The production of chemicals from petroleum (and increasingly from coal and biomass) has seen many technological changes and the development of very large production sites throughout the world. The hydrocarbons in crude oil and gas, which are mainly straight chain alkanes, are first separated using their differences in boiling point, as is described in the unit Distillation. They are then converted to hydrocarbons that are more useful to the chemical industry, such as branched chain alkanes, alkenes and aromatic hydrocarbons. These processes are described in the unit, Cracking and related refinery processes.

In turn, these hydrocarbons are converted into a very wide range of basic chemicals which are immediately useful (petrol, ethanol, ethane-1,2-diol) or are subjected to further reactions to produce a useful end product (for example, phenol to make resins and ammonia to make fertilizers). Many examples are found in the group of units on this web site devoted to Basic chemicals.