Tag Archives: Green Chemistry

Green Chemistry related

The problem about data

Posted on by
Reply

Maybe it’s because I’m a scientist, or maybe it’s a personality preference, but I’ve always been intrigued by people who seem content to make decisions on the basis of a relationship, or on what some celebrity, business leader or political leader says.  My reaction in those cases is to become more skeptical, investigative, and analytical which in turn usually prompts me to discount what is being asserted as a truth or a direction I should head.  Throughout my career I have always believed that I need to collect enough objective, verifiable, multi-characteristic data upon which to base a program, project or business decision. 

When it comes to sustainability, environment, safety, health, green chemistry and engineering, and related fields, it has always troubled me that professionals and practitioners in industry and government will spend more time talking about needing data and not having data than they spend collecting it.  After talking about it ad nauseam, many seem to ignore the fact that despite not having enough data, they’ll go ahead and make decisions anyway.  Let me give a specific example.  In sustainability circles, it is now in vogue to want a life cycle assessment for a product, a building or a service.  I will be the first to admit that doing a life cycle assessment is not easy and it does require a lot of data that in many cases is still not easy to get.  There are approaches one can take around this lack of data, but the general approach is to start cutting things out of the life cycle assessment.  So, the boundary conditions will be narrowed to gate-to-gate, or raw materials to factory gate, or perhaps gate-to-end-of-life.   Or, my perennial favorite is to focus only on a single impact category, usually carbon, carbon footprinting, or eco-footprinting, to the exclusion of every other impact category.  Or, they’ll focus on a single endpoint and trumpet that as the biggest issue one needs to pay attention to.  Doing these things is better than doing nothing at all, right?

Well, maybe, but arguably not by much.  Not to pick on anyone in particular, but to make this more tangible, let’s choose another example.  And please, don’t misunderstand what I am about to say because I do believe that what some companies are doing is profound and is setting the agenda for an industry.  These companies are to be applauded for their work.  Nevertheless, I was looking at the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC) web site yesterday, although I could have chosen any other sustainability-related coalition of your choice.  They all do this.  Anyway, they are attempting to develop a multi-criteria decision-making framework for determining the sustainability of apparel.   They call it the Higgs Index.  The Higgs Index, according to the web site, is largely based on the Nike Materials Sustainability Index (MSI) and the Eco Index, a product of the Outdoor Industry Association.   If you look at the details of the MSI, you will see that Nike punts on certain parts of the life cycle data and on the green chemistry data.  In the case of the LCA data, it doesn’t exist, so they use proxy data, professional judgment and order-of-magnitude estimates – all of which may be acceptable workarounds if done correctly.  In the case of green chemistry, they don’t believe there is a standard method to evaluate it, so they give it a very low weighting.  I don’t happen to agree with that assessment, but that’s another story.

At least Nike, and a few other companies in different industries, are attempting to do something that attempts to be objective and multivariate.  And, to their credit, they are making the process transparent.  What bothers me is that most other companies are not investing to the same extent to develop a process, collect data, or doing too much of anything else.  You could say that is the cost of leadership and the price to set the standard against which all other companies are measured.   The thing that really angers me, though, is the expectation that all the underlying data, if it is developed, should be given away for free.  I have seen this played out time and again.  One company spends a considerable amount of time, energy and effort to develop data and a process for evaluating “greenness” or a product life cycle, or product sustainability only to have tremendous pressure to make these fundamental data public.   You could argue it is a trust issue and people believe they can’t trust data unless it is transparent.  I think it is more that people are unwilling to do the work and want something for nothing.

Today I was reading about how recruiters are using big data and data analytics to zero in on potential candidates.  Big data is what allows online marketers to zero in on your preferences for something by virtue of your on-line profile and data integration from multiple sources.  It’s also being used by both presidential campaigns.  So, you’re on Facebook or some other site and up pops an advertisement for a book, a pair of shoes or something else that is exactly what you didn’t know you wanted, but which piques your interest because it is similar to something you’ve purchased before.  It helps recruiters find preferred candidates (at least those with the biggest online presence) and it helps presidential candidates zero in on certain voters representing the most likely to be influenced with a targeted pitch.  How much pressure is there to make the data that the large search engine companies, all these market analytics companies and the campaigns collect publicly available for free? 

In the final analysis, I think it points to a truism that when it comes to the environment, it’s all free.  The problem, of course, is that when it’s free, it isn’t valued very highly and that certainly explains a lot, doesn’t it?

As always, let me know what you think.

Keeping them fascinated.

Posted on by
5

Over the past few days I have been reminded over and over just how hard it is to get people’s attention.  Well, not only how hard it is to get their attention, but to keep it.  It seems as though there are an unlimited number of distractions and maintaining focus on any one thing at a time is becoming a luxury.  Recently I came across one person who managed to get my attention and keep it .  According to Sally Hogshead – and yes, that’s really her name – the internet age has reduced us to 9 seconds or less to fascinate someone or lose them. 

The wags among you will no doubt be skeptical, but let’s accept for a moment that Sally’s right and think about the implications of a 9 second window of opportunity.  Say you have a web site that takes 3 – 5 seconds to load; you have already lost about half the time you had to make an impression or draw someone in.  Or perhaps you’re making a presentation to your boss or to an important stakeholder – you may have enough time to say who you are before someone is checking their cell phone or their mind is drifting to the mental list of a dozen other things they ought to be doing at that moment.  

For the sake of argument, and to move this little missive forward, we’ll say you’re successful at keeping a person’s attention for longer than 9 seconds.  How long do you have to make your point?  Generally, the best we can hope for is 20 minutes.  Even the best, most focused people among us are generally reduced to 20 minutes of sustained concentration. 

That means we have to reduce what we say to its essence, and for many areas of interest to sustainability, it takes more than 20 minutes just to introduce something.  It gets back to the inherent complexity of sustainability.   Not only do we have to pare things down to the bare minimum, we can’t give people many options because the more options we give them, the more likely they will be paralyzed by indecision.  Long gone are the days of Henry Ford when you could have any color for your car you wanted as long as it was black. 

Here’s a personal example of just how paralyzing lots of choice can be over something really simple.  I went into a store to look for a product I have used for over 40 years and despite going to multiple stores (how’s that for brand loyalty?) I have not been able to find it any longer.  Kind of breaks my heart.  Anyway, it’s not as though that was the only possible choice; there were about a hundred products in that category on the shelf.  Just pick one and go, right?  It took me about 20 minutes to decide what to buy.

My dilemma in that store is a lot like deciding whether one product/chemical/material is more sustainable/green than another.  Simple, right?  Well, sorry, first we have to argue for at least 5 years on the definition of what sustainable or sustainability means because we all know that it means something different to one person or another.  Once we’re worn down enough to get past the need to define it, we have to decide which product attributes will assure us that any given product is the most sustainable product available.  No doubt another easy choice to make, right? 

To begin our journey, we can look at it’s inherent hazard.  Let’s list some properties we might use (in no particular order or implied hierarchy): vapor pressure, octanol-water partition coefficient, water solubility, minimum ignition temperature, flammability, explosivity, corrosivity, LD50 for multiple aquatic non-vertebrate, aquatic vertebrate, mammalian, avian, etc. species, etc., etc.  These are just a few of the relevant choices about hazard and I haven’t even addressed risk.  But let’s plow on.  

Next we might want to consider the life cycle impacts associated with the product; i.e., impacts from raw material extraction through to use and end-of-life: greenhouse gasses, photochemical ozone creation potential, eutrophication, volatile organic compounds, biotic and abiotic depletion, etc., etc.  These are the mid-point categories and I won’t even get started on the potential endpoint categories.  You get the picture and I know I’ve lost 99% of people who may have started to read this.  Undaunted, I’ll plow on to a conclusion. 

There are multiple choices, complex concepts, and a considerable amount of experimental uncertainty.  All this choice needs to be reduced to the byte-sized chunks of the Twitter generation: Product A is more sustainable than Product B and the final choice needs to be presented in a visually stimulating format.  Can we do it?  Well, I think we can get most of the way there, or at the very least, far enough along that we can assure ourselves we are at least making a more sustainable product decision. 

The way I have described it for some time now is that the process of making the choice must be made simple, but it certainly is not simplistic.   That doesn’t mean the comparison is the equivalent of magic or sleight of hand, it’s more like peeling away layers of an onion.  The skin of the onion is the comparison between products, and if we want to know more about how we arrived at that decision, we need to peel back the layers of the onion until we drill down to the very basic data, assumptions and decision logic underlying the final determination.  People may go through all the layers, but most won’t, and if they do, there is enough transparency to at least satisfy a reasonable person that the decision is as factual as it can be and represents the values of the people who made those decisions.

This may help, but I guarantee that there will be those that no matter what you do, there will be a lack of trust among some constituencies.  Those are the people who don’t understand hazard and risk and naïvely believe that we can live in a chemical-free world.  Silly really, but that’s another post altogether.  

Let’s be clear.  Living sustainably is not something humans have done and learning how to live that way is not going to happen overnight.   I also think it’s going to take us longer than 9 seconds to figure it out… 

As always, let me know what you think.

What chemists need to change the world

Posted on by
Reply

In the world of green chemistry, I’ve attended scores of discussions about removing toxic chemicals from common use.  As you probably already know, that is the premier concern of most people promoting green chemistry.  The problem with this is that chemists use toxic and inherently hazardous chemicals because they allow them to readily make and break chemical bonds.  The inconvenient truth of chemistry is that it is usually pretty hard to make and break bonds.  We have to apply energy, in one form or another, and use a variety of strategies to do that.  After all, the reason that chemists like highly energetic materials (i.e., things that will explode, kill you very quickly, violently react in the presence of air and water, etc.) is because they react quickly and usually quantitatively; i.e., the nasty reactant gets used up really fast and we can make many interesting compounds very quickly.  Never mind that the overwhelming majority of what is made never results in a useful material, it’s the chemical equivalent of the search for the holy grail, and the journey (the intellectual flight of fancy) is almost as fun as discovering the coveted grail.

Moreover, I’ve often opined that chemists are a lot like lawyers.  Now that may strike you as odd and the immediate reaction from lawyers and chemists alike is generally not very favorable.  First, chemists can only wish they were paid as much as lawyers and lawyers think they should have large sums of money just because they’re lawyers.  And, if you’re not careful, they just may sue you to get it.  Makes you wonder if chemists made as much as lawyers, would there be more chemists – probably not?  Anyway, putting that distinction aside, and the fact that it is arguably more difficult to get a PhD in chemistry than it is to get a law degree, lawyers generally rest their case, so to speak, on precedent.  So do chemists.  What I mean by this is that both professions depend on earlier work that can in some cases be over a hundred years old.   The precedent is either re-interpreted or applied in a slightly different but related way, but in essence, it has not changed.

Okay, so where am I going with this?  The problem with chemistry, and where discussions about sustainable chemistry become difficult, is that chemists can’t keep using the same nasty precedents they’ve always used.  That’s a tall order.  It isn’t just that the chemicals are toxic, chemists have to stop using the chemical synthetic strategies that use those chemicals.  For the sake of argument, let’s say that “modern” chemistry was established after the second world war and we have had two or three generations of chemists over the past 50 – 60 years trained on precedent created during that time.  Modern chemistry was established on the precedent of a series of named reactions (e.g., Friedel-Crafts, Wittig, Knovenagel, etc.) many of which were actually discovered in the previous century or the early part of the twentieth century.   Nowadays, new classes of reactions are so significant we see them awarded the Nobel Prize (e.g., the metathesis reaction).   Okay, so maybe I’m being a bit hyperbolic, but actually, many practicing synthetic chemists in industry use a decidedly small number of reaction classes that account for a majority of the syntheses they use.  In GSK over about a ten-year period that we looked at this, about 80% of the reactions could be accounted for by 26 classes of reactions, and a significant number of these were simple reactions like acid or base hydrolysis reactions.

Tension arises in green chemistry discussions because of what is considered “good” science.  All those chemists weaned on past precedent stretching back to the 19th century believe that “good” science is that which relies on the “good” science of previous eras.  So, we use platinum group or rare earth catalysts, we use highly energetic materials, and we create novel chemical scaffolds from petroleum because that’s what we know to be “good” science.  The NSF, the NIH, all the government agencies that fund, grant, award and reward current chemical research use precedent created at a time when the world was something to be exploited and there were no boundaries. 

The idea, for example, that we make use of chemistry that is biologically based is, by definition, suspect and not good chemistry.  Shifting to a non-petroleum starting material leaves us at a loss because the molecule is highly functionalized (i.e., it has oxygen, sulfur, nitrogen, etc.) and has multiple bonds that are hard to activate.   It’s long past time for the funders and the review panels to strip away their bias of what constitutes “good” chemistry and simply not fund chemical research that proposes to use scarce, non-renewable, toxic and otherwise undesirable chemicals.  It’s also long past time for chemistry to be taught in a way that recognizes our need to do things in a way that is truly sustainable. 

We have a long, hard road ahead of us to make this happen.  It can be done, it’s just a matter of thinking about what kind of future you want, broaden your horizons, and reinterpret what is “good” science.  

As always, let me know what you think.

How Long Will Things Last? Part 3 – Platinum Group Metals

Posted on by
Reply

Usually when I start talking about chemistry-related topics among friends and family, a not so fond memory of high school chemistry causes an involuntary contortion of their faces into a mask of horror for a fleeting moment.  That’s rapidly followed by a brief smile as they blurt out “how interesting” and frantically look to see if there is a clear avenue of escape.  “Oh no,” they say, “here he goes again….”  Yup, here I go again.

Today I’d like to talk about the group of metals surrounding platinum at atomic number 78 and weighing in somewhere around 195 grams/mole.  These are undoubtedly a critically important group of metals.  Along with platinum, the other five of interest include ruthenium, osmium, rhodium, iridium, and palladium.  Humor me a bit and let’s expand the aperture to include a few more metals most would immediately recognize – silver, and gold.  For those of you who aren’t chemists, the platinum group metals are of great interest because they are used as catalysts in one form or another.  For example, palladium on carbon is used extensively in chemical reductions.  Rhodium, palladium, platinum, iridium, ruthenium, osmium and rhenium in particular have been and continue to be extensively used with new and interesting ligands to create organometallic catalysts of one kind or another.   These metal and organometallic catalysts are used for everything from petroleum refining, to catalytic converters on automobiles, to enabling some very elegant and complex synthetic strategies that lead to life-enhancing drugs.  In addition to being used as catalysts, these metals are used in a host of other applications for electronics, and of course, many of us wear these metals as one form of jewelry or another.

So why should you care about these metals?  Well, if you’ve read my previous two posts, you might have some idea about where I’m going to head.  Let’s return to our well-used infographic for a moment.   You can see that platinum, rhodium, silver, are on the chart, but the consumption information for rhodium is not available.  We see that silver is projected to have something between 9 and 29 years of supply, and platinum, somewhere between 42 and 360 years supply.   Interestingly, iridium is among the densest and rarest of this group of metals.  It is rare because ultimately it is mined from meteors that have found their way to the earth’s surface.  Fortunately the rarity does not translate to cost since the demand for this metal is not all that high.   You can find other interesting facts about the platinum group metals, including current prices, here.   As we saw with phosphorus, we occasionally see rapid price fluctuations for some of these metals.  Here is a graph for rhodium prices between 1992 and 2012.

Let’s look a moment at the supply of the PGM’s.  As I mentioned, the PGM’s are mined in several places where they are most abundant, and these places happen to be in South Africa and Russia, with the most abundant reserves found in South Africa.  Metals mining is arguably one of the more difficult and dangerous occupations and South African metals producers in particular, do not have a great history of good relations with its workers.  You may have seen that recent unrest at one mine resulted in the death of 34 miners and earlier this year, the firing of 17,000 striking miners resulted in a price escalation for platinum to $1600.00/troy ounce.  From a sustainability perspective, this is a socio-economic impact and risk writ large.   In 2008 the U.S. National Academy of Sciences produced a report on Critical Materials and the US Economy, and I have stolen a graph from that report below.

 

image

As you can see, for the three PGM’s listed, palladium, platinum and rhodium are in the upper quadrant of the graph – high impact and high supply risk.  If you want to learn more about the PGM supply situation I would urge you to have a look at the U.S. Geological Survey site.  They have a variety of helpful publications like this one full of facts and data.   If you spend any time researching these metals, I think you will see that we are rapidly depleting supplies and that the supply chains are subject to frequent disruptions resulting from civil unrest and this unrest invariably results in rapid price fluctuations.

Mining of any kind usually has devastating impacts on the environment as large amounts of rock are typically removed, crushed and further processed to extract extremely small amounts of metals from the extremely large amounts of rock.  Very simplistically, further processing is done, as in the case of gold, by spraying cyanide solutions on mine tailings, collecting the solution and chemically destroying the gold-cyanide complex to obtain the desired pure metal.  After extraction, there are large piles of rock that continue to leach, over time, a large amount of different heavy metals, many of which are very toxic to humans and the environment.   These mountains of rock are not backfilled into the pits or tunnels from which they came, so we are left with a very changed topography in the vicinity of these mines.  The “gift” that keeps on giving.

There are no easy answers here.  Society is heavily dependent on these metals and many others, and we are rapidly depleting known reserves.  We are taking a large amount of mass, concentrating the desired metals, then dispersing these same metals into different products in a form that is equally difficult to recover and reuse.  There are some bright spots, as in the case of catalytic converters on cars where there is recycling, but we still lose large amounts of the platinum and rhodium out the exhaust pipes of our automobiles.  We will continue to need these metals because they enable our current way of life.  But in requiring these metals, we will be driven to increasingly more difficult extractions, to the oceans and lower grade ores, all of which will come at an increasing human and environmental cost.  We may even have to think about collecting a few meteorites or prospecting on the moon.

As always, let me know what you think.

Sustainable or Green Chemistry – does it matter what we call it?

Posted on by
Reply

In January of 2012 a group composed largely of academics from a variety of chemistry backgrounds assembled for a National Science Foundation symposium/meeting to discuss sustainable chemistry.  Most notable to me, at any rate, was the fact that there were none of the usual suspects from the green chemistry illuminati listed as participants at the workshop.   Moreover, the group produced some headline conclusions about sustainable chemistry which I paraphrase below:

[gn_list style=”star”]
  • Systems-level thinking is required.
  • More fundamental research should be use inspired.
  • Green is not synonymous with sustainable.
  • Efficiency is necessary but not sufficient due to the rebound effect (author’s note:  Jevon’s paradox).
  • Sustainability research and education is multi-disciplinary and collaborative.
[/gn_list]

How interesting is that?  Are we to discern anything from the conclusions drawn?  In my opinion, humble or otherwise, I think so.

I think it’s safe to say that there was a conscientious and concerted effort on the part of the NSF to distance itself from the green chemistry community.  I won’t speculate on why, but I think that was the case.  I also think that there was an attempt to broaden the discussion beyond firmly entrenched interests in the green chemistry community around toxic substances, and that is a decidedly good thing.

So did they get it right?  I think mostly so.  At least the conclusions above suggest that they got past the traditional stumbling points and contentiousness that has characterized green chemistry discussions and highlighted the importance of systems-level thinking, the importance of making research useful, interesting and scientifically defensible, and that sustainable chemistry needs to be more multi-disciplinary and collaborative.

Imagine, synthetic organic chemists actually looking beyond their round bottom flasks to engage collaboratively with other scientists and the larger world….well, I can dream, can’t I?  But I digress.  Is it important what we call it, sustainable or green?

Well, that is the kind of question that one labels as the logical fallacy of the false dichotomy or black and white.  We need to stop arguing about what we call things and instead move forward beyond the personalities, the politics and the pedantic.  In fact, Sustainable chemistry includes what is currently discussed as green chemistry and it’s a matter of scope.  Maybe it doesn’t matter so much what we call it, just so long as we move towards making the chemical enterprise more sustainable.   We have a very long journey ahead of us, let’s get on with it.