Green Chemistry - chemical ecology

Whole Earth, Winter, 1999 by Bradley Pine

First there were alchemist, then devil-may-care industrial chemists. Are green chemists, who will do not harm, about to be born?

Recently, at the corner of Connecticut Avenue and K Street in downtown Washington, D.C., where the policymakers, lobbyists, and high-priced public relations professionals converge, a quick survey found little, if any, knowledge of "green chemistry." Said one well-dressed lawyer, "I guess the easy, clever answer should be that it sounds like a new policy oxymoron, like `politically correct' or `military intelligence.'" A red-suited woman, exiting a cab and heading toward the government affairs offices of the new Daimler-Chrysler corporation, said it sounded "environmental, and if it is, I'm sure I'll hear more about it."

Linking environmentally benign assumptions with industrial chemical processes or public perceptions of chemicals in our lives has not always been successful. After all, the book that is widely credited with starting the modern environmental movement, Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson (1962), focuses almost entirely on the devastating effects of synthetic chemical pesticides. The resulting demonization of chemistry and the chemical industry has continued.

Part of the problem has been that the traditional criterion for evaluating a chemical process used in manufacture has been its yield. [The amount of product from] the chemical process or synthesis was the primary (and sometimes sole) focus of the chemist's effort. Questions about the environmental or health impact were traditionally left to others.

In the mid 1970s, the Monsanto Corporation undertook an advertising campaign, "Without Chemistry, Life Itself Would Be Impossible." Clever and easy to remember, it was intended to remind consumers that chemistry is part of almost everything we do every day. Chemists and science teachers around the country enjoyed hanging posters carrying this tag line and smiled at the tautology. This is self-evident, they thought, and if people took a moment to consider the notion, they would understand the importance and essentiality of chemistry and chemicals in everyday life.

The public was unconvinced. National surveys at the time linked chemistry with terms like "mad scientist," "nuclear winter," "pollution," and "inhuman." There was nothing "green" about it. This was, after all, the same period of our history in which Los Angeles experienced the worst air pollution ever recorded in the United States and the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire because of the thick layer of toxic and flammable chemicals. An entire city was closed because of toxic chemical contamination in Love Canal, N.Y., and the pristine Puget Sound was rendered unfishable at Commencement Bay in Tacoma, Wash., because the floor of the bay was coated with heavy metals and polychloro-biphenyls (PCBs)--residue of a decade of lumber processing. Chemicals, it seemed, were the root cause of our pollution problems.

Several years later, the paradigm was pushed further. The efficiency of natural versus synthetic products [was] challenged in groundbreaking research about the relative environmental impacts of paper and plastic (polystyrene) cups. Several studies, most notably the work of Martin Flocking of the University of British Columbia, dispelled the assumption that paper cups, because they were made of "natural products," were more environmentally friendly. In fact, the environmental costs of producing and recycling paper cups were similar to, if not more than, those related to the production, disposal, and recycling of polystyrene cups. This finding became important when fast-food giant McDonald's decided to develop a polystyrene recycling industry to reuse and recycle its hamburger containers. (McDonald's decision was later reversed under pressure from leading environmental groups.)

The paper cup controversy was one of many academic and public policy discussions that led to the acceptance of "externalities" as a measure of the real and total costs of environmental impacts. Externalities are the costs of product development that are outside of the direct line of production and not necessarily borne by the producer. These costs are often shouldered by society.

The Green Revolution

Green chemistry asks chemists to consider externalities. Rather than working only to maximize the yield of a particular synthetic process, chemists now must consider at what cost that yield will be achieved, and whether, within the context of the synthesis itself, a more effective process might be undertaken. [Costs are not just the expense of how-much-in, how-much-out, and making back your research investment as quickly as possible. They include the added expense of health and safety to workers and consumers, disposal of waste atoms and molecules, treatment of harmful by-products of chemicals manufacture, correcting harmful impacts in the environment (e.g., dioxins on fish), and using "too much" energy and "too many" sequences in changing one molecule into another. --Ed.]