PASS by a chemical plant, and the plumes billowing from its smokestacks may get you thinking. What filthy concoctions are being brewed inside, and what nasty stuff is it spewing into the environment?
You could be right to worry. The chemical industry relies on many ingredients that in the wrong place are harmful to the environment, human health or both. If that turns your nagging doubt into a full-blown headache, popping a pill will only make it worse: pharmaceuticals are just one of the resulting products that few of us could do without.
Short of getting rid of our drugs, paints, plastics and textiles, what can be done? Quite a lot, actually. Beyond the bubbling syntheses that make the chemical products we all rely on, a different sort of chemical transformation is now taking place. Catalysed by yo-yoing oil prices, new regulations and pressure from consumers and retailers, industrial chemistry is getting cleaner. Products as diverse as the shoes we wear, the soap we wash with and the decaf we drink are starting to be manufactured in processes with a green tinge.
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“Yo-yoing oil prices, new regulations and pressure from retailers and consumers are all making chemistry go green”
The concept of “green chemistry” dates back to the mid-1990s, when two US chemists, and , were lamenting that most strategies to combat pollution focused on cleaning up messes rather then preventing them in the first place. They set out a for a better way of working, starting with the tenet that it is better to avoid waste than to have to dispose of it. That was followed by calls for renewable starting materials, fewer harmful solvents, more efficient catalysts and minimising energy use by, for example, designing reactions that could work at ordinary, ambient temperatures.
These principles might seem like common sense, but they are a step change for many industrial chemists and process engineers. Take solar panels. The energy used to make them takes away some of their sustainable-energy shine, that much is clear, but what about the materials they contain? Often these are toxic, come from petrochemical sources or contain scarce metals. The principles of green chemistry require all this to be taken account throughout the lifetime of a product and beyond. “We’d ask: are there toxic materials there which could when they are put into landfill 20 years down the road?” says Warner.
Oil decline
Since 1996, the best of such thinking has been recognised by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) through its . But it is only now, with the threat that oil production will soon decline and heightened appreciation of the scarcity of other resources, that things are starting to take off. According to the , which speaks for the chemical industry, some 10 per cent of all the petroleum consumed in the US goes into making drugs, food wrappings, computer cases, cosmetics and the like. Scarce metals such as tantalum, platinum and hafnium are also frequently used in electronic components or as catalysts in conventional chemical reactions.
So going green makes sound economic sense, says Buzz Cue, who introduced green chemistry to the drug manufacturer Pfizer a decade ago, and now works as an independent consultant. The improvements can help drugs companies to save $10 to 15 million per blockbuster drug per year, he says.
But it’s not just about the economic bottom line: pressure from consumers is increasingly a factor too. Retailers are increasingly putting pressure on suppliers to restrict or ban suspect chemicals such as those on the (SIN) list drawn up by the International Chemical Secretariat (ChemSec), a pressure group based in Sweden.
The UK retail pharmacist Boots, among others, has gone even further by from its own-brand products if they can have harmful effects. These include phthalates, used as plasticisers in nail polish and hairsprays, and alkylphenol ethoxylates used as emulsifiers and surfactants in products such as hand lotions. Both have been implicated as possible hormone disrupters: alkylphenol ethoxylates, for example, can degrade in the environment into chemicals that feminise fish, says Stephen Johnson of Boots. The move fits into frameworks such as the European Union’s (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemical Substances) programme, which came into force in 2007 and could restrict or even ban the use of some chemicals now on the market.
“Even firms that are making headway tend to be reticent about green progress – for many consumers ‘chemical’ is still a dirty word”
It is very early days for green chemistry. “There is a lot of talk but the fact that we have a sin list means there is a way to go yet,” says Nardono Nimpuno of ChemSec. “But smarter companies can see there is a market opportunity here.”
Even those firms that are making headway with green chemistry tend to be reticent about their achievements. For many consumers “chemical” is still a dirty word. “Let’s say you’ve come up with this revolutionary way to make your product 10 times safer than it was before,” Warner says. “The only way you can brag about that is to say that what you used to sell was 10 times as toxic.” Yet some green shoots are beginning to spring up across the chemical industry, as the examples that follow show.
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Pharmaceuticals: A not so bitter pill