Cashing in on the green chemistry revolution
Green chemistry's been called the next industrial revolution. Can we clean up to cash in?
Thursday, November 10 2011 || Science || BY Lesley Springall
James Wright is busy changing the world. The University of Auckland associate professor of chemistry is working with a team based here and abroad on a new process for bleaching wood pulp using hydrogen peroxide instead of chlorine. If successful — and the signs are good — the novel oxidation process could also be used to clean up effluent from the pulp and paper industry, tackle smelly smoke stacks and transform industrial waste products into valuable chemical entities. Wright can’t say more about that last part as it’s all a bit hush, hush.
Chlorine has been used in industry for hundreds of years. It’s cheap, plentiful and extremely toxic. But in the late 1990s Terry Collins, a Kiwi who now heads the Institute for Green Science at Pennsylvania’s Carnegie Mellon University, challenged chlorine’s supremacy with the creation of a new class of oxidation catalysts. As well as leading to Wright’s work in the pulp and paper industry, these new hydrogen peroxide-based processes have applications as diverse as creating new laundry products and destroying chemical warfare pollutants.
Wright, with many others, was named a co-collaborator when Collins was awarded the prestigious US Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award in 1999 for his work in this area.
The new oxidation process is almost ready to knock chlorine for six, but Wright and his colleagues have to take a bit more cost out for it to compete effectively. Then it’s going to transform the way things are done, he says.
Wright, a self-proclaimed green chemist, is one of many researchers beavering away in our universities and crown research institutes (CRIs) to replace ‘dirty’ products with environmentally-friendly alternatives. Green chemistry works on the ‘benign by design’ principle — designing chemical processes and products (which pretty much leads to everything that exists today) that eliminate or at least reduce the use and generation of hazardous substances.
The term was originally coined by US chemists John Warner and Paul Anastas, who published Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry in 1998.
More than a decade on few non-scientists have heard of the term, yet the opportunities for green chemistry and the companies and countries that embrace it are enormous, says Wright.
Two home-grown companies hoping to cash in on green chemistry discoveries are nickel-zinc rechargeable battery manufacturer Anzode and biofuel company Lanzatech. Simon Hall, professor of electrochemistry at Massey University and one of the scientific founders of Anzode, says the economic payoff of inventing a greener battery using zinc was obvious. “We saw it as a huge opportunity right from the beginning.” Lanzatech founders Richard Forster and Sean Simpson were similarly unblinkered. “Our drivers were several-fold: they were economic, they were environmental, but they were also pragmatic ... without a sustainable story, getting funding for an idea is very hard to do,” says Simpson.
International examples where companies are said to have got it right are the redesign of Ibuprofen, the active ingredient in the anti-inflammatory Nurofen, and the antifoulant Sea-Nine. Originally the production of Ibuprofen involved six steps that resulted in 40% product and 60% waste — waste that had to be carefully and expensively disposed of. With the product due to come off patent in the late 1980s, production was shortened to three steps that almost eliminated waste, used far less energy and took far less time, making Ibuprofen much cheaper to produce.
