Sustainable Chemistry
Toward Sustainable Chemistry
Terry Collins*
Chemistry has an important role to play in achieving a sustainable civilization on Earth. The present economy remains utterly dependent on a massive inward flow of natural resources that includes vast amounts of nonrenewables. This is followed by a reverse flow of economically spent matter back to the ecosphere. Chemical sustainability problems are determined largely by these economy-ecosphere materials flows (see the figure, below), which current chemistry education essentially ignores. It has become an imperative* that chemists lead in developing the technological dimension of a sustainable civilization.
When chemists teach their students about the compositions, outcomes, mechanisms, controlling forces, and economic value of chemical processes, the attendant dangers to human health and to the ecosphere must be emphasized across all courses. In dedicated advanced courses, we must challenge students to conceive of sustainable processes and orient them by emphasizing through concept and example how safe processes can be developed that are also profitable. Green or sustainable chemistry† can contribute to achieving sustainability in three key areas. First, renewable energy technologies will be the central pillar of a sustainable high-technology civilization. Chemists can contribute to the development of the economically feasible conversion of solar into chemical energy and the improvement of solar to electrical energy conversion. Second, the reagents used by the chemical industry, today mostly derived from oil, must increasingly be obtained from renewable sources to reduce our dependence on fossilized carbon. This important area is beginning to flourish, but is not the subject of this essay.
Third, polluting technologies must be replaced by benign alternatives. This field is receiving considerable attention, but the dedicated research community is small and is merely scratching the surface of an immense problem that
Terry Collins*
Chemistry has an important role to play in achieving a sustainable civilization on Earth. The present economy remains utterly dependent on a massive inward flow of natural resources that includes vast amounts of nonrenewables. This is followed by a reverse flow of economically spent matter back to the ecosphere. Chemical sustainability problems are determined largely by these economy-ecosphere materials flows (see the figure, below), which current chemistry education essentially ignores. It has become an imperative* that chemists lead in developing the technological dimension of a sustainable civilization.
When chemists teach their students about the compositions, outcomes, mechanisms, controlling forces, and economic value of chemical processes, the attendant dangers to human health and to the ecosphere must be emphasized across all courses. In dedicated advanced courses, we must challenge students to conceive of sustainable processes and orient them by emphasizing through concept and example how safe processes can be developed that are also profitable. Green or sustainable chemistry† can contribute to achieving sustainability in three key areas. First, renewable energy technologies will be the central pillar of a sustainable high-technology civilization. Chemists can contribute to the development of the economically feasible conversion of solar into chemical energy and the improvement of solar to electrical energy conversion. Second, the reagents used by the chemical industry, today mostly derived from oil, must increasingly be obtained from renewable sources to reduce our dependence on fossilized carbon. This important area is beginning to flourish, but is not the subject of this essay.
Third, polluting technologies must be replaced by benign alternatives. This field is receiving considerable attention, but the dedicated research community is small and is merely scratching the surface of an immense problem that