Green chemistry stresses 'benign by design' mindset
One of the best pieces that I ever read in the Atlantic magazine was an article simply titled, "Why McDonald's Fries Taste So Good," which was actually an outtake from the now famous book, "Fast Food Nation," published back in 2001.
French fries are probably my second biggest food vice, after ice cream, so I devoured that essay, which explored the chemistry that went into fueling the cravings of people like me after food regulations and cost-cutting measures inspired McDonald's and other quick service restaurant to change the way they cooked things. In the case of fries, it was the beef tallow in which the fries were, well, fried. When McDonald's changed up the recipe, it had to figure out how to keep the taste the same. Enter the wonders of modern food chemistry.
Of course, the United State has a long history of using cool new chemical discoveries for the cause of innovation. The problem, according to a new article published by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), is very few of those compounds and substances were vetted for their human or environmental impact before they wound up in products.
The good news is that the University of California at Berkeley, which could be considered the leading school for chemistry in the United States, has started asking why and teaching its students to do the same. The article, "Pure Chemistry," provides an overview of the work going on at Berkeley and other places -- academic and corporate -- around the country to help the cause of "green chemistry." Here's an excerpt from the onearth article, written by Laura Wright Treadway:
"Of all the goods bought and sold in the United States, some 97 percent incorporate manufactured chemicals of one kind or another. Many of them make life better: they are used to purify water, fight cancerous tumors and keep the lights on. The problem is that of the 87,000 synthetic chemicals that have come into production to date, nobody is quite sure which ones simply make life better and which ones are harmful. That is because for the past 200 years, since the advent of modern chemistry, nobody ever asked chemists to consider that question."
The work at Berkeley aims to change that mentality, by creating a new generation of scientists trained to keep the "benign by design" mantra near and dear to their hearts. I'm happy to say that my nephew is a graduate fellow in chemistry -- only he's at Princeton University -- and I know he is also thinking this way.
You absolutely must read this NRDC article if you are involved in product design or are grappling with the health impacts of chemicals that are already in your company's products. The big culprit in all this, according to the article, has been the ineffective Toxic Substances Control Act, which provides that companies give the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 90 days notices before a new substance is introduced to the market. That's all the time that that EPA has to respond before this stuff gets sent out into the world. Oh, and the stuff that was on the market in 1976 before the law was passed was grandfathered, meaning it didn't need to withstand any safety scrutiny.
The goods news, as the article reports, is that many big name companies are participating in this movement, even if they aren't trumpeting that fact very loudly. The theory is that if you admit that you are creating safer or green chemicals that the stuff you have been creating could be suspect. In any event, the article notes that Pfizer, Merck, DuPont and Dow are all applying green chemistry to their research and development.
I found it especially intriguing that literally hours after I read the NRDC's "Pure Chemistry" article, I saw a press release from Procter & Gamble regarding a new deal with ZeaChem. The partnership focuses on biorefining technologies that could be used to create bio-based chemicals and fuels.
Of course, it will take years to change old habits, but I think you need to give these companies points for trying AND for doing so more at the grassroots level. And maybe instead of teaching high-school students to memorize the elements chart, we should get them asking the kind of probing questions that we lead to the real greening of chemistry.
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com