chemistry essay assignment

chemistry essay assignment

The Impact of Green Chemistry on Sustainable Development

1. I. Introduction to Green Chemistry

The first set of principles was introduced by Anastas and Zimmerman in 1998 before the concept of “green chemistry” itself began to be fully understood and employed. A focus on natural resource management, regeneration, led to a focus on society’s interest in controlling chemical products at the “very source”. The development of green chemistry in the context of realistic green and sustainable chemistry development is iconoclastic insofar as it marks a systematic attempt by many prominent chemists to reshape the practice of chemistry and the way it is taught. Today, the field of green and sustainable chemistry is a legitimate subset of the classical regulatory, economic, environmental, educational, and scientific enterprises of the chemical enterprise as a whole and recognized as such by industry and by government, as well as in venues like JACS, Science, and Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN).

Green chemistry, also known as sustainable chemistry, is the design of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances. These chemicals are also known as environmentally benign or benign by design or benign by intention. It involves the deliberate design of chemical products and processes to apply the principles of green chemistry. The field of green technology incorporates a continuously evolving spectrum of methods and materials, from green nanotechnology and “clean” chemistry in the shortest sense, to permanent design for environment towards a “light green” sustainability paradigm.

2. II. Principles and Benefits of Green Chemistry

The application of these principles within chemistry has led to the development of techniques that utilize ‘atom economy’ to ensure that the final product incorporates more of the reactant atoms and fewer of those of any ancillary reactants or catalysts. Additionally, the principle of using ‘renewable feedstocks’ ensures that the feedstocks utilized to develop the chemical are from agricultural origins, which are common, fast-growing, and, as a consequence, readily available. In addition to this, another of the 12 principles is ‘minimizing the usage of auxiliary substances’. This is because of the economic loss and loss of scarce raw material or energy due to the use of auxiliary substances. The use of these principles tackles a number of major problems within the industry and allows the processing and eventual chemical to fundamentally become more environmentally benign. For this reason, as well as the social and economic benefits that the execution of these principles possesses, they are now being used to drive the industry towards a more sustainable system.

With the increase of environmental and public concerns about the hazardous effects associated with the production and use of chemicals, chemical companies have also started to look for new, safer, and potentially more cost-effective products and processes. These concerns have prompted the pursuit of green chemistry, which is designed to form chemicals through sustainable development. Green principles are grounded on 12 established principles: ‘prevention’, ‘atom economy’, ‘less hazardous chemical synthesis’, ‘designing safer chemicals’, ‘safer solvents and auxiliaries’, ‘design for energy efficiency’, ‘use of renewable feedstocks’, ‘reduction of derivatives’, ‘inherently safer chemistry for accident prevention’, ‘design for degradation’, ‘real-time monitoring for pollution prevention’, and ‘use of catalysts’.

3. III. Applications of Green Chemistry in Various Industries

Nonetheless, several national sciences, namely the performing catalysis and organic chemistry regions, have yet to make noticeable advances in sustainability the main driver for their work. Even in cases where sustainability has been recognized as a sincere consideration, Pakistan will lag behind other fields. The lack of gold benefit systems for researchers who focus their work on embedding sustainability is considered to be a barrier to modifying their methodologies. To combat this, grant review board members and different administrative authorities have embraced a more comprehensive review process for both grants and personal badges that promotes the best sustainable proposals.

Manufacturing advances in green chemistry have been capitalized on in the pharmaceutical, agricultural, textile, and transportation sectors. In order to address those aforementioned issues, groundbreaking renewable-based green chemistry options include enzymatic chemo-biocatalysis in the manufacture of active pharmaceutical ingredients, textiles, and cosmetics. Additionally, several cases of impactful research and development (R&D) in green chemistry have been profiled, many of which have been accredited to the sustainable recovery of natural resources, particularly water. For example, a process to efficiently scrub ethane gas with low energy, low waste emission, and low waste production was developed using green chemistry approaches, including temporary water and reactivity combination. Therefore, interdisciplinary development, cooperation, and investment in green chemistry-based options have been recognized as critical in the drive to embed sustainability. Given the significant possible return, scientific interests continue to thrive in this field.

Due to traditional high-temperature, high-pressure, and toxic solvent requirements, the chemical sector is one of the most environmentally concerning. Transitions in the chemical industry, also identified as chemistry, refer to the development of alternative production processes and a focus on the end goal as well as the methods used to arrive there. The use of renewable resources, such as bio-based feedstocks, in place of petroleum for the construction of chemical intermediates is a widely recognized approach for the feedstock stakeholders.

In addition to pharmaceutical applications, green chemistry has also had a considerable impact on the agricultural sector. Products such as greener fertilizers reduce environmental pollution. In Japan, green chemistry-based agricultural practices are used to reduce the amount of chemical fertilizers sprayed on crops, reducing carbon dioxide emissions to the amount it takes to power 5,700 households. In addition, new chemicals and technologies can reduce the amount of pesticide in the environment, which can be harmful to both human and environmental health.

III. Applications of Green Chemistry in Various Industries

4. IV. Challenges and Future Directions in Green Chemistry

The biological and genetic factors that influence rosy periwinkle’s production of alkaloids are being exploited to develop transgenic plants for the scalable production of drugs to treat HIV/AIDS. The application of molecular genetics to the pathway reveals in a comfrey overexpressing of 465 cells. In addition, chemicals will collectively form fuel, agro-chemicals, photochemistry, and rubber. Microbes will remain the essential pesticide, food, textile, and cleaning industries; these microbes will be essential for bio-remediation. Advances in bioscience can enable scientists to predict how a metagenome or a cell will behave in any given environment, thus facilitating complex genomics studies. Second, our capacity to study molecules – proteins, metabolites, and DNA – has increased markedly over the past 12 years. Thus it is possible to study the genomic, proteomic, and metabolomic response of an organism to molecules such as drugs, pesticides, and environmental agents before, during exposure, and once the agent has been eliminated from the system. Equally, you can also use transgenic tools to develop models of disease between species that are inherently disease and between those that are not. Cross-species testing of molecules means we can compare protein function of the species leading to improved safety of products.

Developments in bioscience and ‘omics’ technologies

In a contemporary paper, written from a UK National Academy of Science viewpoint, the authors made recommendations concerning the future direction of green chemistry. Research should concentrate on improving policy recommendations for governmental consumption; environmental footprint of substitution should, wherever practicable, extend to the whole life-cycle of products so that design can be based on true sustainability, and the reduction in the human and economic costs of clean-up. Recently, Green Chemistry has increased more interest in some of the emerging research areas. Some of these emerging areas have been briefly presented in this paper. These various scientific developments may assist in making chemical design and chemical synthesis much easier and can offer much of the same flexibility associated with current approaches where material design occurs at different scales.

Future research directions

There are several areas that could hamper the adoption of green chemistry as a prevailing approach to decrease or eliminate waste, since it is trying to decrease risks in human health and environment and due to this property, it follows the principles of green chemistry. To summarise these main obstacles: the lack of interest of industries and researchers for practicing and pursuing green chemistry because of the risk of decreasing profits or funding; limited and fragmented regulatory policies; attitudes to barriers and cost of radical new thinking and methods that are further, embedded effects of legacy knowledge, attitudes, and education; and that the post-Kuhn world of paradigm incommensurability and intractable polarity. Related to these barriers is concern over the term green chemistry, which has been described as disciplinary and utopian, with little interest in acknowledging uncertainty and ambiguity. Four important global research institutes reviewed the past, present, and future of the progress of green chemistry research field. Although the authors showed the progress of green chemistry principles in this fasting-moving field, however, in the conclusions of these papers, the authors agree in terms of the necessity to carry out large-scale investment in green chemistry research. Significantly, research has focused on solvent waste and emissions. Many of the journals and books on green chemistry focus on the potentials of individual substances to elicit harmful properties to human health and/or the environment. Meaning that they are assessed by their hazardous properties i.e. physical/chemical reactions, routes into humans, etc. There is an inherent reductionist problem here; the substances are taken out of their context for the overall safety of the product recipe.

Challenges to widespread adoption of green chemistry

5. V. Conclusion and Call to Action

Green Chemistry or Sustainable Chemistry is fundamental to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. It includes both the intergenerational stewardship of research and innovation, as well as the responsible management of toxic chemicals. It is far more than offering some alternative ingredients or product substitutions. Although significant “green chemistry” research has been undertaken in many countries over the past ten years, what is now needed is practical implementation that will arise out of public and private policies, and changes in the attitudes of engineers, toxicologists, and chemists once they are gainfully employed and confident in this transformation. This article reviews the recent research work of a competition that has investigated these transformational issues. We then discuss research findings from the USA on what specific types of green chemistry enhancements could be adopted in the USA to better protect health and the environment. We conclude with a call to action for expanded green chemistry policies broadly, and those specific recommendations developed by our sustainability experts. In order to build sufficient capacity and negotiate toxicological considerations around these policies, we explore the research findings of a USA study on what the general aspects of “sustainable” or “green” chemistry might be communicated to reconcile potential changes among state officials. Our findings indicate that technocratic enhancements to some aspects of industry climate policy may be proposed and adopted in many states. More influential, however, would be initiatives that are bi-coastal and have another national operating frame, with specific examples and legal tailoring of green chemistry at state level. The need for culture change among chemists and managers and with the media is discussed and networks to facilitate such change are proposed.

V. Conclusion and Call to Action

In this article, we have sought to address two key questions: (I) how do WWF stakeholders in the USA understand and think about sustainable chemistry? (II) what attitudes do they have towards the implementation of green chemistry policies in their local communities? In short, we argue that the results of this public access panel implemented study reflect increasing public skepticism around the safety of chemicals and policy response. This is evidence that traditional and external educational strategies to bring change in these beliefs may not work without more concerted collaboration and dialogue. We suggest that instead, new techniques, including educational collaboration with regional organizations and hands-on demonstrations of green chemistry, need to be implemented in order to build capacity and support for increasing green chemistry capacity and education.

Summary of Insights from this Stream of Empirical Research into Green Chemistry and Sustainable Development