The Father of Green Chemistry Says It Must
New Haven, Connecticut – Whether it’s the world’s most notorious environmental cause (global warming) or just another case of the TV weatherman flubbing the data, it’s an unexpectedly scorching late May morning on the campus of Yale University. But things are cool and collected inside the laboratory where Dr. Paul Anastas listens to a young student describe the tests she’s running on a batch of chemicals she has placed in clear glass bottles. Dr. Anastas, a youthful-looking 45-year-old, is cool and quiet, too. While he’s often called the father of “green chemistry,” a term he coined more than 15 years ago, the teacher is letting his student do most of the talking.
Later, sitting in the office where he became Yale’s Director of the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering in January, Anastas explains, “When the university approached me, they asked if I could do an introductory-level class for freshmen. I told them, ‘I’d love to.’ Because students like these are going to be the industrial chemists, corporate leaders and managers responsible for the consequences of the world we make. They need to be thinking about sustainability–about things that are good for human health and the environment–and that also makes good business sense.”
Where Anastas is concerned, one should disregard any notions of egghead scientists and sustainability advocates who want to turn the world “green,” but who don’t have any real idea of the huge business and political hurdles to implementing such environmental alternatives. Although he is an academic, Anastas is also a hard-nosed realist, having seen science good and bad all the way from chemists’ benches to the halls of government regulatory agencies and to Fortune 500 boardrooms worldwide.
Formerly the Chief of the Industrial Chemistry Branch of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Anastas has worked as an industrial chemist, and as the Assistant Director for the Environment in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. With Dr. John Warner, he wrote the seminal reference work, Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice, which defines 12 interdependent principles of green chemistry and how they drive improved business performance for adopters. And Anastas helped found the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards in 1995, which has honored some 70 companies and universities for practical innovations in safer chemistry. Anastas knows, he says, how difficult a challenge businesses face in a world that is demanding safer chemicals.
The Importance of Chemicals
“Chemistry applies to everything we see and touch in our daily lives,” Anastas says, “in every aspect of society and the economy. It’s in our food packaging, dyes on the clothes we wear, the way we raise our food and medicines we give our family. Environmental consciousness,” he says, “has helped ensure there’s not arsenic in the playground equipment our children play on and there’s not lead in the paint on our cars.”
In the past, with efforts such as the Pollution Prevention Act, the U.S. tried to clean up environmental problems with technological bandages, addressing problems after they happened. “That’s changing,” Anastas says.
“Now we’re saying go further upstream and prevent problems from ever happening,” he observes. “Green chemistry added that to the toolbox of what chemistry can do.”
What it Means to be Green
The Yale scientist describes green chemistry as working with the design of processes and products that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances.
“For too long, business people believed there was a trade-off: if something was good for the environment, it was going to cost too much money,” Anastas says. “Some people actually thought if you wanted to make money you had to damage the environment,” he says, shaking his head. “With green chemistry and green engineering these approaches are actually profitable. They increase competitiveness and innovation.”
What Needs to be Done
Among the pressing reasons industry needs green chemistry Anastas includes global warming. He says chemistry is essential to the challenge because it touches the nature of generating substances and materials we use to create, store and transport energy. He believes it can also help make the basic chemical and material design of alternative energy sources–such as solar and wind turbines–more efficient, effective and clean.
“Green chemistry is not just something chemists need to think about,” says the professor. “In the interest of homeland security and basic facility security, it makes sense to have fewer hazardous materials around. Lowering inventory toxicity is also paramount to Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) professionals who must ensure worker safety and environmental compliance,” he adds.
Anastas notes that supply chain professionals also have a vital role, since reducing hazardous chemicals provides leverage for competitiveness and innovation. On the financial side, it helps meet business-partner sustainability demands, which, if ignored, could cost companies that lag behind in adoption.
“Regardless of where you are in the supply chain, you can make a difference,” assures Anastas. “It has nothing to do with your company employing chemists, and everything to do with a better bottom line. You can demand green chemistry,” he says. “You can set specifications for your products so they don’t hurt your customers and the environment. People simply need education about what’s possible. Every day companies make these demands of their supply chain and get great win-win results.”
Of course, paradigm shifts come in small steps. To accomplish toxic chemical reductions in industry, government policies and regulations must be amended so they don’t hinder implementation of greener industrial practices. Corporations must resist using capital invested in existing, non-green operations as an excuse for not cleaning their inventories, processes and products.
The Rest of the World Outpacing America?
Anastas feels that business people becoming too comfortable doing things the way they always have must be avoided. Green chemistry can be seen as a new source of solutions. He adds that some emerging economies are pulling ahead of the U.S. Currently, there are green chemistry networks in nearly 30 nations.
“I was in China last week,” Anastas says. “They’ve got a huge nationwide effort of top scientists. With their great science and 12 or 13 green chemistry research centers, the movement is penetrating to the country’s top leadership.
“The U.S. needs to pay attention to this,” he continues. “I think there could be no greater competition than to see which American companies can be better at making the most money on sustainable technology.”
Businesses are Stepping Up
Of course, many visionary companies are now innovating around green chemistry in America. Those who’ve made breakthroughs in their use of greener chemicals in daily operations (and have been honored in the Presidential Challenge awards) include pharmaceutical giants Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Merck, and consumer products companies such as S.C. Johnson & Son, Monsanto, PPG and BASF.
“The EPA stated that just the winners in the awards have reduced or eliminated enough toxic chemicals to fill a train car eight miles long,” says Anastas. “Hundreds of other companies, of all sizes and verticals, are making strides. People are finding solutions for being both profitable and sustainable.” He goes on to cite the Green Chemistry Pharmaceutical Round Table and the Green Electronics Council as examples of whole industries embracing green chemistry, too.
“I believe these companies will realize financial benefits by lowering the cost of operations and by making them cleaner and more efficient,” says Anastas. “But the biggest benefit is in the innovation, the creativity in what is possible in business. It’s about what you can create, what you can do new.”
The Time to Act is Now
Anastas says the central question hanging over the heads of global business professionals is, “Will we engage at the level of intensity and urgency that is necessary?
“There has been so much good change, in so many industries. There’s no doubt we can succeed,” he says. “But will we engage?”
As Anastas packs his briefcase to go to a meeting, he stops. “Ultimately, I’m an optimist,” he says. “The good news is all the achievements we’ve seen at companies and universities pursuing green chemistry. In the number of products and processes that have been transformed: countless examples. That’s not theory–it’s real-world practice.
“The better news,” says Anastas, “is all those examples represent only a fraction of the power and potential of green chemistry to transform our world. I believe we are looking at the tip of the iceberg.”
Interested people may learn more at Yale’s Center for Green Chemistry & Green Engineering website: www.greenchemistry.yale.edu
From Compliance Side Total Chemical Management Today, Vol. 4. No. 1 2007