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Green chemistry approaches strive to design chemical products and processes that leave no mark on the environment. The 12 principles of green chemistry were first established over 25 years ago, with the publication of the foundational textGreen Chemistry in 1998. With the growing awareness of the importance of sustainability across all industries, green chemistry provides an opportunity for introducing innovative solutions by bringing sustainability to molecular design.
Technology Networks spoke to the co-author of Green Chemistry, Dr. John Warner, founder, CEO and CTO at Technology Greenhouse, as well as co-founder and president of Beyond Benign, on what inspired the creation of green chemistry and how these principles can be harnessed to tackle thesustainability challenges of today.
Blake Forman (BF): A picture of Blake Forman
Senior Science Writer
Technology Networks
Blake pens and edits breaking news, articles and features on a broad range of scientific topics. He earned an honors degree in chemistry from the University of Surrey. Blake also holds an MSc in chemistry from the University of Southampton. His research project focused on the synthesis of novel fluorescent dyes often used as chemical/bio-sensors and as photosensitizers in photodynamic therapy. What inspired you to publish the 12 principles of green chemistry?
John Warner, PhD (JW): Headshot of Dr. John Warner
CEO & CTO
Technology Greenhouse
Dr. John Warner is co-founder of the field of green chemistry with Dr. Paul Anastas. As an industrial chemist, he has over 350 patents. He received the Perkin Medal in 2014. As an academic, he was tenured full professor of chemistry and plastics engineering at UMASS where he started the world’s first PhD program in Green Chemistry. He has over 120 publications. In 2004 he received the Presidential Award for excellence in science mentoring from the NSF and President George W Bush and in 2022 he received the August Wilhelm von Hofmann Medal from the German Chemical Society. As an inventor, Warner's inventions have led to the founding of many companies in the fields of photovoltaics, neurochemistry, construction materials, water harvesting and cosmetics. Warner currently serves as President and CEO of The Technology Greenhouse.
I was a 27-year-old industrial chemist working at Polaroid Corporation. One of my technologies went to large-scale manufacturing and we had to go through the regulatory process to get the technology to market. The technology I had created was a novel biomimetic technology. When we went through the US EPA [environmental protection agency] regulatory process, there wasn't a protocol to evaluate the technology as it was a completely new product. Ironically, had we kept doing it the way we always had, it would have been much easier to get regulatory approval. As a result, I started to question – wouldn’t anything better for human health or the environment, by definition, be new and different? I concluded that for progress to be made as an industry, we would need to rethink the regulatory structure.
While I was having this very intellectual discussion about policies and industry, disaster happened. I lost my two-year-old son to a birth defect. Lying in bed the night of my son's funeral, staring at the ceiling, I asked myself – could something I touched in the lab have caused this? The answer to the question drove me crazy, but more importantly, the fact that I couldn't answer the question drove me crazy. I reflected upon my education as a chemist and on global education in general and had this epiphany that universities never teach anything about toxicity and environmental impact. We learn a little about how to research whether a known compound is toxic. However, if you're an inventor and you make a new molecule that's never existed before, there is no framework in the field of chemistry to evaluate the safety and environmental impact of that molecule.
Imagine a scenario where I held up material and asked PhD chemists to list all its properties. Someone might describe the boiling point, melting point, viscosity, color and transparency. It's unlikely anyone would describe the toxicity or environmental impact of that material. For some reason that doesn't make the list. And I would argue that in the same way that I can predict a substance's color, with a little bit of training, I can also predict whether something is going to be toxic, biodegradable or contribute to climate change. However, if I'm not taught how to make that prediction, then all I'm going to do is make hazardous materials. The 12 principles of green chemistry provide a mechanistic lookup table that scientists can refer to when they are inventing something new to ensure they are considering toxicity and environmental impact.
What are the 12 principles of green chemistry?
The 12 principles of green chemistry set out by Dr. John Warner and Dr. Paul Anastas in their book, Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice are as follows:
Waste prevention
Atom economy
Less hazardous chemical synthesis
Designing safer chemicals
Safer solvents and auxiliaries
Design for energy efficiency
Use of renewable feedstocks
Reduce derivatives
Catalysis
Design for degradation
Real-time pollution prevention
Safer chemistry for accident prevention
BF:
A picture of Blake Forman
Senior Science Writer
Technology Networks
Blake pens and edits breaking news, articles and features on a broad range of scientific topics. He earned an honors degree in chemistry from the University of Surrey. Blake also holds an MSc in chemistry from the University of Southampton. His research project focused on the synthesis of novel fluorescent dyes often used as chemical/bio-sensors and as photosensitizers in photodynamic therapy.
Can you describe the sustainability pendulum and “materials metabolism”?
JW: Headshot of Dr. John Warner
CEO & CTO
Technology Greenhouse
Dr. John Warner is co-founder of the field of green chemistry with Dr. Paul Anastas. As an industrial chemist, he has over 350 patents. He received the Perkin Medal in 2014. As an academic, he was tenured full professor of chemistry and plastics engineering at UMASS where he started the world’s first PhD program in Green Chemistry. He has over 120 publications. In 2004 he received the Presidential Award for excellence in science mentoring from the NSF and President George W Bush and in 2022 he received the August Wilhelm von Hofmann Medal from the German Chemical Society. As an inventor, Warner's inventions have led to the founding of many companies in the fields of photovoltaics, neurochemistry, construction materials, water harvesting and cosmetics. Warner currently serves as President and CEO of The Technology Greenhouse.
If we want to move towards a sustainable future, we need to understand what's happening in different phases of a product's life cycle. I feel the best way to do that is to take inspiration from nature. The pendulum view of sustainability I've constructed involves looking at assembly/disassembly at a mechanical, chemical and extraction level. If we look at these three phases in more detail, we can begin to recognize that these processes are reversible.
For example, petroleum starts as a blob of goo under the ground. We then extract the petroleum and perform a range of chemical reactions to make a piece of plastic such as polyethylene. Let’s say at the same time, we've converted some of those molecules through chemical manipulation into a dye or a pigment. Now we have a dye and a piece of polyethylene. If we then turn that polymer into a plastic bag and we take the dye and stick it onto that bag, that's no longer chemistry, that's now a mechanical interaction. Now you have a product, in this case, a bag with a label. In a perfect world, we would use the bag repeatedly, but if that's a problem we could remove the label from the bag and maybe make the same bag again. Alternatively, we could make a different product, putting a different label on it and that is the assembled/disassembled system. We might want to go further and depolymerize the polyethylene back to ethylene. I don't think that this is the best path forward to a sustainable future.
What we need are more processes that fit under the domain of materials metabolism. This is where biology and nature have a lot to teach us. If we think about when we eat food, we take proteins and break them into amino acids. We take carbohydrates and make sugars. We take lipids and make fatty acids. But that's not all. Biology, over 3.8 billion years of evolution, has developed the ability in the same cells at the same time to perform deconstruction and construction at the molecular level. We recombine amino acids to make proteins to grow hair. We recombine carbohydrates to make sugar and glycogen. We recombine fatty acids to make the lining of nerve cells. While I would say we've got a lot of evolved technology in the mechanical side of recycling, we haven't even scratched the surface of how to do simultaneous assembly and disassembly at the molecular level.
And so that's the sustainability pendulum, it swings between the natural world of stable ecosystems and the human-built world of products. Located between these two systems is materials metabolism. We want to harness this domain to go from natural resources to products and then reverse those steps back to nature. Although it is daunting and could take us years to accomplish, it is doable. What I worry about is the financial and the political will to create the resources to enable it, and that I feel is unlikely, unfortunately.
Sustainability is an issue of scientific invention, not of desire, and people aren't learning the skills to be able to harness material metabolic processes. That's why green chemistry is so important.
BF:
A picture of Blake Forman
Senior Science Writer
Technology Networks
Blake pens and edits breaking news, articles and features on a broad range of scientific topics. He earned an honors degree in chemistry from the University of Surrey. Blake also holds an MSc in chemistry from the University of Southampton. His research project focused on the synthesis of novel fluorescent dyes often used as chemical/bio-sensors and as photosensitizers in photodynamic therapy.
What are some of the biggest barriers to sustainability and how do you believe these could be overcome?
JW: Headshot of Dr. John Warner
CEO & CTO
Technology Greenhouse
Dr. John Warner is co-founder of the field of green chemistry with Dr. Paul Anastas. As an industrial chemist, he has over 350 patents. He received the Perkin Medal in 2014. As an academic, he was tenured full professor of chemistry and plastics engineering at UMASS where he started the world’s first PhD program in Green Chemistry. He has over 120 publications. In 2004 he received the Presidential Award for excellence in science mentoring from the NSF and President George W Bush and in 2022 he received the August Wilhelm von Hofmann Medal from the German Chemical Society. As an inventor, Warner's inventions have led to the founding of many companies in the fields of photovoltaics, neurochemistry, construction materials, water harvesting and cosmetics. Warner currently serves as President and CEO of The Technology Greenhouse.
It isn't a lack of desire to make sustainable technologies. It is an issue in the inventive process itself. Over the last 30 years, the number of new products launched has decreased. Society has gotten worse at inventing. Big corporations used to have amazing R&D centers. Now, the accountants see that as a cost center and have outsourced research and development. Universities used to do a lot of research and development, but now we've created impact factors in the metricization of publication. This implied that journals wanted many papers fast, so research has focused less on applied studies and more on fundamentals. Our society has become over-metricized, and that over-metricization has created a decrease in productivity.
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Redefining Lab Practices To Prioritize Sustainability
BF:
A picture of Blake Forman
Senior Science Writer
Technology Networks
Blake pens and edits breaking news, articles and features on a broad range of scientific topics. He earned an honors degree in chemistry from the University of Surrey. Blake also holds an MSc in chemistry from the University of Southampton. His research project focused on the synthesis of novel fluorescent dyes often used as chemical/bio-sensors and as photosensitizers in photodynamic therapy.
How important is education in creating the next generation of sustainable technologies?
JW: Headshot of Dr. John Warner
CEO & CTO
Technology Greenhouse
Dr. John Warner is co-founder of the field of green chemistry with Dr. Paul Anastas. As an industrial chemist, he has over 350 patents. He received the Perkin Medal in 2014. As an academic, he was tenured full professor of chemistry and plastics engineering at UMASS where he started the world’s first PhD program in Green Chemistry. He has over 120 publications. In 2004 he received the Presidential Award for excellence in science mentoring from the NSF and President George W Bush and in 2022 he received the August Wilhelm von Hofmann Medal from the German Chemical Society. As an inventor, Warner's inventions have led to the founding of many companies in the fields of photovoltaics, neurochemistry, construction materials, water harvesting and cosmetics. Warner currently serves as President and CEO of The Technology Greenhouse.
As you can imagine, I get asked all the time, John, what are the most important things we should do? Should we work on energy? Should we work on energy storage? My answer is always – we need to focus on education.
If people understand the principles of green chemistry and they go into the plastics industry, they're going to make better plastics. If they learn the principles of green chemistry and go into the pharmaceutical industry, they're going to make better pharmaceuticals. For me, rather than debating what we should do, give researchers the power. Every consumer-facing company knows that if you make your customers sick, that's going to be very bad for sales. Companies understand the importance of safe and environmentally inert products, but then they look to their workforce inventing the technology and they don't have the skills to do it. It's not that they don't want to, they can't. Over time, as more and more universities start teaching the importance of sustainability and principles such as green chemistry, and these students start populating these companies, we may begin to see markable improvements in the environment.
That's why, in my opinion, one of the most important organizations for sustainability today isBeyond Benign, a nonprofit organization run by Dr. Amy Cannon, who selflessly and tirelessly with a small team goes to universities to ask them to commit to bringing the principles of green chemistry into the required courses, not as an elective— but as a fundamental part of what it means to be a chemist.
There are nearly 200 universities globally that have now signed the commitment. This sounds like a lot, but with over 10,000 universities globally it's still only a small proportion. Unfortunately, there are still many universities that won’t sign believing they are the best chemists in the world.