‘It’s not easy being green’
Dr. Robert M. Gresham, Contributing Editor | TLT Lubrication Fundamentals January 2009
A new form of chemistry is steering the world toward environmentally friendly sustainability, but ...
The sun is our ultimate source of energy, and living in real-time means using that energy immediately for what you need.
KEY CONCEPTS
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Traditional organic chemistry primarily involves the synthesis of new chemical entities for a practical purpose.
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So-called green chemistry focuses on environmentally friendly chemical syntheses while also taking global economic realities into account.
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In the long run green chemistry is more profitable and therefore more sustainable in the marketplace.
The title is quoted from the immortal words of Kermit the Frog. While his reference referred to the rigors of being Kermit, my reference is toward the whole green movement, especially as it impacts our industry.
As most readers of my articles know, I was an organic chemist in my youth. Organic chemistry primarily involves the synthesis of new chemical entities for, you hope, some practical purpose. The fun was developing syntheses that would get to the final product in the fewest number of steps utilizing elegant use of chemicals and reagents.
Indeed, organic chemistry synthesis can be a very creative and artful process. During the 1970s I spent a number of years as a lab rat for the DuPont Co. In those days we weren’t overly concerned with the toxicity or stability of the chemicals or intermediates with which we worked. These problems were easy to handle in the lab, and DuPont was an industry leader in developing safe, repeatable, cost-effective plant processes.
Today, all that has changed. Now society demands that we be green in everything we do. The irony is that most people glom on to the latest fad being pushed by some stakeholder as being green when, in fact, from a global perspective, it actually might not be.
For example, the whole organic food thing has me going. Years ago the only reason we added cost to the supply chain was because “bugs” (whether bacteria, fungi or actual varmints) were eating food as it was being grown, shipped, processed, sold or stored.
Today there are so-called natural things we do to retard the impact of bugs, but will we soon recreate the problem—will the bugs come back, perhaps with a few genetic mutations? I don’t know, but as with most things green there are no real standards or test methods. Just like with organic food, at what point does the food become non-organic? What are the guidelines? What actually
is organic? Just because the label says organic, does that make it so?
Indeed, our behavior sometimes gets down right irrational. At a recent industry conference I heard discussion of the use of formaldehyde as an
in situ biocide. Now formaldehyde is considered a carcinogen and, thus, banned. The idea of
in situ use of formaldehyde is that the formaldehyde is formed in the process and then immediately reacted with something else so that the real concentration of formaldehyde at any point in time is miniscule, therefore causing no exposure to the employee.
If I’ve got it right, this particular process at any point in time generates a finite concentration of 0.49 parts per billion, which is not much. Remarkably, there is a standard, which I believe is 1 part per billion. I say remarkably because it is hard for the lawyers and politicos to deal with such hard-to-conceptualize quantities—they would rather just say “none.”
Anyway, and this is the good part, it seems that if you measure formaldehyde in human breath, we exhale about 10 parts per billion as a result of our normal bodily functions. That is an order of magnitude more than the standard, making the employees themselves the major polluter of carcinogens in the plant—I love this stuff.
Well, hyperbole aside, there really is some hope. The recent ILMA-sponsored MRF 2008 Metalworking Fluid Symposium featured some truly great presentations. A couple that stood out on the green subject were by Dr. Richard Engler from the EPA and STLE-member Dr. James D’Arcy from GM on the whole subject of green “sustainability.” They provided a sensible, philosophical way to look at this whole green business which, as shown above, is not easy. Here’s my version of what they had to say.
Sustainability at its most fundamental level is “living to live off the sun in real-time.” Think about it—the sun is our ultimate source of energy, and living in real-time means using that energy immediately for what you need.
Thus, coal is fossilized energy. Crude oil is much the same, and the food we eat (energy) again is derived from the sun—but all involve time and some level of waste and inefficiency. So the goal is to live off the sun with maximum efficiency. In so doing, ideally we should be able to survive as long as the sun does.
Another way to look at sustainability is meeting the needs of the present without adversely affecting the future. In his fascinating book,
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, author Jarod Diamond explores how various civilizations living in totally remote places survive (or don’t) according to their cultures and the choices they make regarding the resources available in their isolated worlds. Examples include various island cultures in the South Pacific, Easter Island, etc. The point is that these people were, in their microcosms, dealing with the concept of sustainability.
RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Sustainability then really deals with resource management, and those resources ultimately come from the sun in the form of energy. We use energy for heating, mobility and manufacturing goods and services. So how do we become a sustainable society?
According to Dr. D’Arcy, innovation is the answer. Now you can see why a guy like me likes what I’m hearing, as opposed to the irrational ranting of tree-huggers, kooks and other eco-terrorists and radical folks—all sound and fury, signifying nothing, as the Bard said.
Through innovation we must improve on our existing technologies—all of them. We must constantly look for ways to reduce waste through recycling and, here’s another new concept for me, “green chemistry.” Recycling, if you want to be sustainable, is fairly self-evident, but green chemistry speaks to my technical roots as an organic chemist.
Dr. Engler heads up the green chemistry initiative for EPA. In the first paragraph of his paper, he said that all green chemistry has to include economic reality—right away we are getting rid of the nut cases and starting to think straight. The concept of green chemistry must involve global cost-competitiveness. Global here means not only geographically but also from a total systems perspective.
Green chemistry is a philosophical approach to chemistry where the design of chemical products and processes reduce or eliminate the use or generation of hazardous substances. Earlier I was talking about the various synthetic pathways in organic chemistry leading to the final product. The new way of thinking is not just about how elegantly I make some material but, rather, which of the possible syntheses utilizes a greener pathway, uses greener reagents and solvents, involves greener intermediates and greener end-products and is inherently safer chemistry.
Another way to look at green chemistry is to ask—how can I use the fewest number of atoms to make the final product, and how can I maximize the number of these atoms that end up in the final product? Can I use a catalyst (which can be reused) rather than a stoichiometric reagent (which is consumed)? Global thinking about green chemistry involves not only the costs of chemicals, solvents, reagents and energy to perform the synthesis but also the pollution-treatment costs along the synthesis pathway and any special handling, packaging or regulatory-compliance costs.
Thus, green chemistry should, from this global perspective, be inherently more profitable than non-green chemistry. If it is more profitable it will ultimately survive in the marketplace where its less-green competitor won’t—and this is what sustainability is all about in the world of chemistry.
Interestingly, following these principles, GM reported that 34 of its plants no longer use landfills for its processes, except for the cafeteria and restrooms. Hmm, I guess that part of the business hasn’t gotten the word.
So while it isn’t easy being green, it is the only way to be sustainable in the long run. For more information on green chemistry, check out
www.epa.gov/greenchemistry.
Bob Gresham is STLE’s director of professional development. You can reach him at rgresham@stle.org.