Environmental pollution is a major health problem that affects the health of individuals worldwide and is cumulative with other environmental stressors, contributing to the increasing prevalence of cancer, cardiometabolic, neurological and autoimmune diseases (Favé et al, 2018). Although being extensively studied, therapeutic strategies still rely primarily on exposure prevention, often with no option available to allow pollutant detoxification. In this issue of EMBO Molecular Medicine, Wang et al (Wang et al, 2024) investigated potential pharmacological strategies to allow the direct removal of phthalates, major environmental pollutants, from the liver.