• Question: How do we make chemistry environmentally friendly?

    Asked by anon-199498 to Sylvia, Kate, Bryony, Aryanne on 8 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Kate McGonagle

      Kate McGonagle answered on 8 Mar 2019:

      Amazing question! There’s a constant push to make chemistry more “green” as we call it. There are a lot of things going on in many departments and companies to try reduce any negative environmental effects. There are loads of recommended solvent switches that we try to adopt and now all of our solvent bottles are washed, returned to the suppliers and re-used! We go through a lot of them in a day here so this will make a huge difference. We are also trying to recycle more and more of our plastics!

    • Photo: Sylvia Soldatou

      Sylvia Soldatou answered on 12 Mar 2019:

      I’m in complete agreement with Kate’s answer. In the last recent years there has been a great effort to make chemistry environmentally friendlier. It is tru that most of the solvents that we use are toxic for the environment and we have come up with proper ways of disposing them or alternative solvents that could have the same effect.
      There’s an area of chemistry that is called “green chemistry” and is focusing in producing compounds or developing methodologies that minimize the use and generation of toxic substances

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