• Question: How do we make chemistry environmentally friendly?

    Asked by anon-227008 to William, Thibaut "Tibo", Harry, Georgia, Emily, Aimee on 9 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Harry Wilkinson

      Harry Wilkinson answered on 9 Nov 2019:

      There are a lot of different ways that we need to make chemistry a more green science.

      One aspect in which chemistry is helping is that it is constantly coming up with new ways to do industrial processes more efficiently, using less energy, using less rare starting materials etc.

      However chemical research does have issues with sustainability. One thing that really comes to mind is how much single-use plastic we go through. This includes packaging for needles and syringes that we use for transferring liquids between reaction vessels, plastic pipette tips and things like this. There are alternatives which usually use glass which can be reused, but these tend to be less useful and more expensive so don’t get as much use as they should.

      Apart from that, there’s the amount of hydrocarbon solvent that we use, there are various ways you can reduce the amount of solvent used but these tend to be pretty time consuming and not particularly effective.

    • Photo: Georgia Orton

      Georgia Orton answered on 11 Nov 2019: last edited 11 Nov 2019 12:52 am

      There are quite a few things that we can do. For example, some chemical processes use very high temperatures/pressures which requires a lot of energy, or use chemicals which are energy intensive to make or pollute the environment. Many people work on trying to find alternative processes that use less energy, cause less pollution, and use elements that are not as rare.

      During my PhD I worked on trying to replace platinum catalysts with Iron catalysts because we have a lot more Iron on the earth than platinum.

      Lots of scientists are also researching green technologies. A friend of mine at King’s College London is looking at how to use the temperature difference between the inside of your house and the outside of your house to generate electricity!

    • Photo: Aimee Egglestone

      Aimee Egglestone answered on 11 Nov 2019:

      Hey! This is actually a huge part of my job.

      We do a lot of recycling these days in our processes, this means that we clean out a lot of the solvents (liquids we do the reaction in) and even some of the reactants and then put them back into the process, rather than disposing of it and getting fresh chemicals in. This helps us keep things cleaner for the environment in a few ways: We are using less chemicals, so less needs to be made by other plants, so there’s a lower energy wastage; Less chemicals are being pumped to the environment (straight forward pollution) or needing treated (energy and further chemical cost).

      We can use catalysts, this reduces the amount of energy we need to put into a process to get it to work.

      We can use less harmful materials in the first place.

      We can often, even, sell on our “waste products” to other companies to use in their processes rather than disposing of them – for example “Scrubbers” which produce NaOCl (Bleach).

    • Photo: Thibaut Deviese

      Thibaut Deviese answered on 11 Nov 2019:

      This a very interesting question!!! There are actually different ways to make chemistry environmentally friendly but there is stil a lot to be done. Few of te solutions are to limit the use of toxic solvent, recycling the solvents and trying to use alternative solvent. For exemple, in my lab, we are now using supercritical carbone dioxyde (that we have in excess anyway) to replace organic solvents. We also recycle all our glassware, plastic and aluminium.

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