Meet the Green Chemist Who Is Out To Make Chemicals Less Toxic for Humans and the Environment

[eridani]

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18577/its-not-easy-being-a-green-chemist

How did green chemistry come to be?

In 1991, the question that we had was: “Are there people meeting and publishing articles in journals about how to make things that are non-toxic, environmentally benign?” The answer was no. No field of science existed that could bring that together, either intellectually or practically. The reason we needed a field called green chemistry was to provide journals, to provide workshops, to provide conferences, to provide textbooks, to provide classes.

Of all the stakeholders—industry, academia, government—which has been the most responsive to the idea?

While I was at Polaroid, I invented a technology that was very different. We wanted to go to large-scale manufacturing. In the U.S., you have to get approval by the EPA. So we submitted our documentation and the EPA rejected the application. Not because of toxicity, not because of environmental impact, but just because it was different and weird and strange. The EPA said that because it’s different we’re going to make it difficult to regulate. Well, isn’t anything that is better for the environment going to be different?

When my book came out in 1996, within three years every major company had a green chemistry program. Industry immediately got it. If we could come up with ways of making safer products, they would get to markets faster, the liability costs would be lower and they would be more profitable. We haven’t seen that happen in academia.

Academia is slow to change. If you were to look at the top 10 chemical reactions run in the world, most of them have been invented in the last 20 years. None of them are in textbooks.

What do you see as the obstacles to green chemical principles in academia?

There are two “tribes of science’’—the makers of knowledge and the makers of materials. In the 1960s, when the environmental movement emerged, people who were interested in toxicity and environmental impact became those who were making knowledge and studying things. The people who were making things got even more distant. Green chemistry is saying, “Let’s get the makers of knowledge and the makers of things sitting at the same table and make this practical.”

[Demeter]

1. Very important article! Thanks for posting it!

[Fred Sanders]

2. America is on an epic chemical binge. Take a look just at the American food chain, farm to mouth.

Farm production - fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, growth hormones, antibiotics, etc.

Transport and packing - so many chemicals I would have to add an appendix supplied by Dow.

Storage/spoilage prevention - again, so many chemicals I would have to add an appendix B.

In your mouth - Bon appetite!