Session Organizers: John Frazier, Senior Technical Director, Hohenstein Institute of America; Scott Echols, Scott Echols Group, LLC; Robert Buck, Technical Fellow on Sustainability, The Chemours Company
Session Organizers: Jane E. Wissinger, Professor, University of Minnesota; Michael T. Wentzel, Assistant Professor, Augsburg University
This symposium seeks to demonstrate how educators are engaging students in the classroom and laboratories by sharing new innovations in sustainable materials. Society’s dependence on plastics and other resilient fossil-fuel based materials, as well as their potentially negative impact on human health and the environment, is a topic that resonates with students of all levels. We are seeking abstracts which illustrate the use of green methodologies to prepare products which are: derived from renewable feedstocks; designed for degradation; reprocessed and/or recycled; or inherently safer. Of special interest are curriculum materials which meet the 2015 Committee on Professional Training Guidelines requirements to include synthetic polymers, biological macromolecules, supramolecular aggregates, meso-or nanoscale materials and simultaneously include green chemistry and engineering principles. The session is open to K-12, undergraduate, and graduate instruction as well are outreach initiatives. A goal of the symposium will be for each presenter to provide a live or videotaped demonstration of their projects to share with the audience.
Session Organizer: Kevin Maloney, Director, Process Chemistry, Merck
In the past two decades, Green Chemistry has challenged chemists to consider environmental impacts in developing synthetic methodologies and designing manufacturing processes. Despite these efforts, the pharmaceutical industry is among the largest waste producing sectors in all chemical industries, partly due to its typical requirements of multi-step synthesis and stringent regulatory quality standards. While efficient, concise, and convergent synthetic routes to complex molecules are essential for their sustainable production; of equal importance is the efficiency of individual processes that comprise each step along the synthetic route. Therefore, innovative chemistry and process development are instrumental in the design and development of green and sustainable small molecule manufacturing processes. This session will explore how innovative synthetic methodologies, prediction tools, high throughput experimentation, catalysis, solvent selection, recycling, and minimization of unit operations play a vital role in developing a green and sustainable process.
Session Organizers: Jennifer Y. Tanir, Founder, Toward Safer LLC; M. Barclay Satterfield, Eastman Innovation Center Leader, Eastman Chemical Company
One of the barriers to the implementation of sustainable chemistry is strong integration and acceptance throughout the supply chain. Despite many individual single-product or single-company successes, or a few advances in limited sectors’ supply chains, there is still a need for widespread agreement on sustainability goals and cooperation throughout supply chains. This 1-day workshop will focus on formulated household products and attempt to distill the learnings from individual successes into a plan for widespread adoption. The workshop will build on related conversations at the 2017 GC&E Conference and a Green Chemistry article by the ACS GCI Formulators’ Roundtable. The discussions will bring together the technical experts in formulated household products along with learnings from other sectors that can be applied, new ways of thinking, and students who can develop future solutions. The format will be interactive including invited talks as well as brainstorming and problem-solving sessions with the goal of developing a plan (and publication) to better incorporate sustainable chemistry in the supply chain. The workshop will explore: (1) How to drive change, with lessons from past successes; (2) Goals, barriers to achieving those goals, and consensus on what success looks like; (3) Developing a plan forward, including recommendations. The workshop is being organized in partnership with the ACS Committee on Environmental Improvement (CEI).
Session Organizers: Amy Cannon, Ph.D., Beyond Benign; Dalila Kovacs, Ph.D., Grand Valley State University; Pamela Spencer, Ph.D., Angus Chemical; Saskia van Bergen, Washington State Department of Ecology
Toxicology tools and concepts are essential in chemistry courses and programs to develop an understanding of toxicological principles and chemical safety that are traditionally absent from the chemistry curriculum. These concepts are also important in the design of chemical products and processes that have reduced health and environmental hazards. Toxicology can enable scientists to better predict hazards at the molecular level, therefore avoiding the use and generation of hazardous chemicals. Today, there is a movement towards teaching toxicology concepts to chemistry students and professionals in order to better prepare scientists with the skills to design products and processes with reduced hazards.
This symposium will feature: 1) professional toxicologists and chemists who actively use toxicology tools in their practical design of safer chemical products and processes, and 2) faculty members who have adopted toxicology concepts and practices within their chemistry courses and programs. Symposium speakers will provide short lectures on their area of expertise and demonstrate with tools they use in their daily practice, and share curriculum models.
This symposium features the development of new synthetic chemistry from both academic and industrial labs that document not only that waste creation can be minimized, but that by going green, “faster, better, cheaper” processes oftentimes can be anticipated.
Notwithstanding the extraordinary advances being made in synthetic organic chemistry and organometallic catalysis, in particular, the manner in which this discipline has been, and continues to be practiced is simply not sustainable. The enormous amounts of organic waste being generated, the investment of energy in the form of heating and cooling of reactions, and the consumption of endangered metal-catalysts at an ever-increasing rate have all become important considerations for a sustainable future. Fortunately, new technologies are starting to accrue suggesting that synthetic chemistry need no longer be done at the expense of the environment; that the same, useful processes can, in fact, be developed hand-in-hand with the principles of green chemistry.
This symposium, through a mix of invited and contributed talks as well as an interactive component, aims to discuss the various stages of commercialization for green chemistry technologies. Entrepreneurial leaders and stakeholders of chemistry-based start-ups and SMEs will provide their perspectives on the challenges, opportunities, and rewards that arise in advancing sustainable chemistry products and processes. Speakers will come from diverse backgrounds contributing to entrepreneurship and commercialization, such as company founders, intellectual property lawyers and patent specialists, and venture capitalists and funding experts.
Abstract submissions are encouraged from anyone involved in the commercialization of chemistry, academics and business professionals alike. Topics covered by talks may include but are not limited to:
- Technical challenges and solutions (performance validation, product testing, process scale-up, manufacturing)
- Funding (securing investment, leveraging grants)
- Team and leadership (business leadership and advisors, non-technical skills required, collaborations and partnerships)
- Intellectual property (protecting technologies with patents or trade secrets)
- Value proposition, marketing, and pivoting (market validation, disruptive vs incremental technologies, risk mitigation, changes in company vision, marketing of “green” products)
- Path to market and exit strategies (preparing a commercial launch, company vision and potential growth)
The interactive component of this symposium will build on the invited and submitted talks, leveraging expertise of speakers and conference participants, leading to an exchange of ideas and approaches that will highlight what resources and solutions are available to the entrepreneur with a sustainable technology who aims to succeed in the rapidly changing chemical enterprise.
Session Organizers: Anthony Noce, Vice President, EHS Management Systems, Tetra Tech; Lauren Heine, Ph.D., Executive Director, Northwest Green Chemistry
Many chemists are inspired to use their skills to address real world challenges to human health and sustainability. To work on basic and/or applied research challenges that are linked to such challenges is very different from bringing products to the marketplace that actually become sufficiently successful to provide the desired benefits. The benefits may be novel or they may be designed to replace other products because of their impacts on natural resources, due to the generation or use of toxic substances, or because they generate poorly managed waste in a linear “take, make, waste” system of industrial production.
In this session, we will explore both the drivers and barriers for new green chemistry and engineering technology development in products, as well as strategies to enhance the drivers while overcoming the barriers. Drivers are diverse and may or may not be in alignment. Examples include environmentally preferable procurement, regulation, research support, scale up support, voluntary supply chain initiatives, technical standards and/or ecolabels, awards and prizes, preferential government purchasing, and so much more. In contrast, there are many obstacles, including lack of funding, lack of access to entrepreneurial or business expertise, limited market awareness, entrenched products with dominant market share, procurement experts with limited understanding of alternative technologies, standards that prefer older technologies driving incremental improvements rather than real innovation, regulatory requirements, lack of access to scale up resources, cultural inertia, and more.
Sustainable design has touched virtually all sectors of society and industry ranging from agriculture to energy to building materials to pharmaceuticals and personal care products and cleaners. Unfortunately, these accomplishments have taken place largely in the industrialized nations of the world. There are only nascent efforts to advance Green Chemistry in a small number of developing and transitioning countries and the lack of awareness of the mechanisms to ensure a broad-based adoption of Green Chemistry is evident. The Center for Green Chemistry & Engineering at Yale has entered into a 3-year collaboration with United Nations Industrial Development Organization [UNIDO] to raise awareness on Green Chemistry and build capacity on approaches to reduce the generation and use of hazardous chemicals throughout the industrial life cycle in developing countries. This session will allow workshop participants to learn about the Yale-UNIDO initiative, and critically, engage in a discussion of the approaches and strategies of the Yale-UNIDO initiative for the dissemination of the Principles of Green Chemistry to a wide range of stakeholders who wish to pursue sustainable development within their countries. In addition, the workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to discuss and debate ideas on how to implement green chemistry in developing and transitioning countries, and will hopefully inspire participants to engage in the global dissemination of green chemistry principles in an effort to create economic, environmental, and societal benefits. Finally, the session will also engage students by presenting an award for the best video which will be used for green chemistry dissemination purposes.
The products of the electronics industry are rarely developed with the application of green chemistry principles, but the amount of chemistry that goes into a given product is, of course, enormous. While the vast majority of chemical innovation occurs far upstream of the brand of the product on the shelf, the demand and enforcement of green chemistry ideals in the form of product material content requirements occurs at the finished good level. The awareness of chemical substances actually used in their product – and available options –at the brand level is generally quite limited. The general lack of chemistry and chemical engineering expertise in the downstream electronics industry means finished goods manufacturers and brand owners are simply unprepared to know when and where green chemistry can and should be driven back upstream. Only the largest manufacturers have resources (often quite limited) to address these issues, while everyone else simply ignores them due to lack of resources and expertise.
Given the severe challenges and impacts in many lifecycle stages including manufacturing, use and end-of-life, as well as the opportunities presented, existing systems and approaches to improve awareness are clearly inadequate to address these issues. In this symposium we will explore the value of strategies and tools that can enable more effective decision making about materials selection choices across the technology life cycle. These include technology roadmap planning, systems engineering, standards development, business processes and proactive approaches (such as “Design for Environment”, or DfE). The value to manufacturers, will be to get the information they need as well as examples of how they can use that information to drive the application of green chemistry to improve the environmental and human-health performance of their products during all phases of the product lifecycle. Moreover, with a proactive, holistic strategy across the lifecycle we can also apply alternative assessment to enable a “greener” selection of materials replacements when needed.
Our goal is to start by focusing on how to get the information needed by the brand owners from their upstream suppliers so they can begin the process of identifying opportunities and prioritizing them. We will present examples of how this works in real life, as well as areas for improvement, including related Grand Challenges to the electronics industry. We will further demonstrate how to think about green chemistry in the supply chain and how and why to bring it into downstream manufacturing companies.