careers and recruitment
Green chemistry puts down roots
Industry is discovering that ‘green’ approaches to chemical processes are not only beneficial to the environment
but can boost profits too. It’s fertile ground for collaboration between academic and industrial scientists.
Brendan Horton
The journal Chemical and Engineering News
downsized its list of top chemical companies
from 100 to 75 last spring: mergers and
acquisitions had taken their toll of the annual
rankings. Although the economic pressures
on this mature industry seem clear, ‘green’
chemistry approaches, which have previously been spurned, are now spurring innovation and improving industrial competitiveness. The applied nature of green chemistry
has resulted in a great deal of collaboration
between government, industry and academic institutions, as well as between chemists,
engineers, biologists and business people.
Such collaborations have resulted in the
formation of green chemistry centres and
institutes, and may bring new norms for how
to do research and development.
Green chemistry (or ‘sustainable’ chemistry, which is the preferred adjective in
Europe) is showing that the ability to rethink
traditional chemistry processes and to
design closed-system manufacturing processes is not only beneficial to the environment but also makes economic sense for the
industry. Green chemistry is creating tools
that allow industry to move towards the
goals of ‘industrial ecology’. Paul Anastas,
chief of the industrial chemistry branch at
the US Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA), and known to some as the father of
the term green chemistry, describes it as the
design of chemical products and processes
that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances.
According to Terry Collins, winner of this
year’s academic prize in the US President’s
Green Chemistry Challenge, “chemistry is
the key science of sustainability”. Collins, an
inorganic chemist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, emphasizes three
areas where significant innovation is needed:
solar-to-chemical energy conversion, toxicity reduction, and biomass conversion as
a source of long-term feedstocks for the
chemical industry.
Industry has an important role in this
movement. Collins draws attention to the
fact that there are four industrial awards in
the Green Chemistry Challenge and only
one academic award at the annual Green
Chemistry and Engineering conference,
which was held last month in Washington,
DC. “The EPA and the organizations behind
the awards are recognizing developments
within the chemical industry where people
are making major improvements to existing
products or producing something that
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PULP AND PAPER
wood
pulp
delignification
pulp
delignification
and
A TAML catalyst
effluent decolorization
TEXTILES
dye bleaching and
Fe
effluent decolorization
LAUNDRY
dye transfer inhibition and
H
stain bleaching
plus
O
H
O
WATER CLEANING
halogenated aromatics and
organics destruction
Science of sustainability: Collins and his team from Carnegie Mellon University won an award in the
US Green Chemistry Challenge for developing tetraamido-macrocyclic ligand (TAML) catalysts. They
could have an impact in a range of industrial processes.
improves biomass transfer or reduces toxicity,” he says. But Collins is troubled that there
is relatively little work being done on solarto-chemical energy transformation: “We
should have an enormous amount of work
going on in that area, and we don’t.”
In contrast to earlier environmental
movements, in which protection was thought
to be a cost burden to industry, many areas of
green chemistry are now being driven by
industry, says Anastas. As far as he is aware,
this is the first time that, through basic science,
it is being shown that environmental protection can be profitable to industry.
When the EPA initiated its push into
green chemistry in the early 1990s, it
designed programmes to attract industrialists, acad-emics and environmentalists. This
was done by including as founding members
the Chemical Manufacturers Association,
chemical companies, the American Chemical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the Council for Chemical Research
and the Environmental Defense Fund.
The EPA is mainly a regulatory agency,
but in the case of the green chemistry initiative it is acting more like a grants agency and
a facilitator of technological development.
Its programmes in green chemistry “do not
have a regulatory bone in their body,” says
Anastas. “Green chemistry approaches are
being used to find ways of meeting economic
and environmental goals without having
to regulate.”
The academic community’s participation is based on the fundamental scientific
challenges to be overcome in such areas as
© 1999 Macmillan Magazines Ltd
solvents, benign processing, toxicity, catalysis, bio-based synthesis and processing, and
solar-to-chemical conversion. Through this
green movement, a new culture of collaboration seems to be developing to do research
and engineering, raise money, and make
technology development more efficient.
Successful collaboration
For Ken Seddon, a professor of chemistry at
the Queen’s University of Belfast in Northern
Ireland, linking the fundamental chemistry
to industry is very important: “We are very
much concerned with having an applied
direction to our research.” His research area,
ionic liquids, provides many opportunities
for doing fundamental work as well. “Everything that we’ve learned or guessed about
chemistry is based on observations in a molecular medium,” says Seddon. But this new
class of solvents offers very different kinetics
and thermodynamics, as well as the potential
for improved product yields and selectivity.
For example, he says, the Friedel–Crafts
reaction conventionally takes 8 hours at
80 °C and produces 80% yield with a mixture
of isomers. Using ionic liquids, the same
reaction takes 30 seconds at 0 °C and has a
98% yield of a single isomer. That is impressive in itself, but there is also a potential significant environmental benefit with ionic
liquids. They should prove to be an effective
substitute for an environmentally troublesome class of solvents common to many synthetic pathways, namely volatile organic
compounds or VOCs.
Ionic liquids remain in a liquid state
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careers and recruitment
through the temperature range 197 °C to
200 °C, they have no effective vapour pressure, and they are relatively cheap and easy to
prepare. Exploratory work in Seddon’s laboratory (in collaboration with BP Chemicals
and Unilever Port Sunlight Research Laboratory) has demonstrated that a wide range of
catalysed organic reactions occur in roomtemperature ionic liquids, including
oligomerizations, polymerizations, alkylations and acylations. These are serious candidates for commercial processes.
According to Seddon, about half the work
he was doing with his industrial collaborators was confidential; the rest was generic
research on ionic-liquid solvent systems. A
meeting between nine of his industrial collaborators soon revealed that they would be
happy to share the generic half of their
research on ionic liquids with each other.
This resulted in the formation of the Queen’s
University ion liquids laboratory or QUILL,
with member companies putting up £20,000
(US$32,000) each year for membership.
Not all the work for QUILL goes on in the
university’s laboratories. “The companies’
workers will work in our labs; our workers
will work in their labs. It’s a genuine collabo-
ration — a two-way street,” says Seddon. Not
only do these collaborations bring together
academics and industrialists, they also draw
on a variety of scientific talent, including
chemical engineers, and physical, inorganic,
organic, pharmaceutical, and computational chemists. The 17 companies involved reap
better returns by sharing the generic information, as they can then focus more on their
specialized interests.
Multidisciplinary approaches
Not far removed from Seddon, in either his
green philosophy or his desire to bring industrialists and academics together, is Chris
Adams, an inorganic chemist with 24 years’
industrial experience at Unilever. A couple of
years ago, when Unilever sold its chemical
interests, Adams decided to create a new kind
of research organization, which became the
Institute of Applied Catalysis (IAC).
The institute spun out of the UK government’s Foresight programme, which,
according to Adams, “was an attempt to
develop consensus and enthusiasm for what
science and technology can do for quality of
life and wealth creation”. The programme
pulled together several thousand senior
Further information on the web
Center for Green Manufacturing
http://bama.ua.edu/~cgm/
Ken Seddon
http://www.ch.qub.ac.uk/staff/personal/krs/
krs.html
http://quill.qub.ac.uk/
QUILL
Ionic Liquids Review
http://www.ch.qub.ac.uk/resources/ionic/revi
ew/review.html
Robin D. Rogers
http://bama.ua.edu/~rdrogers/
Terry Collins
http://www.chem.cmu.edu:80/Collins.html
http://www.iac.org.uk/
Chris Adams
James Bashkin
http://wunmr.wustl.edu/Faculty/Bashkin/index
.html
EPA Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge
http://www.epa.gov/greenchemistry/Presiden
tial Green
EPA green chemistry page
http://www.epa.gov/greenchemistry/index.htm
Journals and reports
The Journal of Green Chemistry
http://www.rsc.org/is/journals/current/green/
greenpub.htm
Clean Products and Processes
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/10
098/index.htm
RAND report on environmental technology
http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1068/
International Congress of Chemistry and
Environment
http://www.chemenviron.com/icce1.html
798
Networks, centres and institutes
Green Chemistry Network
http://www.chemsoc.org/gcn/index.htm
Green Chemistry Institute
http://www.lanl.gov/greenchemistry/
Italian Group of Catalysis
http://www.fci.unibo.it/gic/
Netherlands Institute of Catalysis Research
http://www.nlknowhow.org/organisations/ N I OK.html
Dechema
http://www.dechema.de/englisch/fue/nice/
pages/f_index.htm
Catalyse et chimie des matèriaux divisès
http://www.agro.ucl.ac.be/cata/nice.html
Fifth Framework programme: energy,
environment and sustainable development
http://www.cordis.lu/eesd/home.html
Chemistry societies
Royal Society of Chemistry
http://www.rsc.org/
American Chemical Society
http://www.acs.org/
ACS careers services
http://www.acs.org/careers/welcome.htm
Chemical Manufacturers Association:1999
Responsible Care Conferences, ChemRAWN
http://iupac.chemsoc.org/symposia/conferen
ces/chemrawn/chemrawnIX.html#2
Gordon Research Conference
http://www.grc.uri.edu/pro U R Lgrams/1999/
green.htm
Chemistry conferences
http://www.rsc.org/lap/confs/confshome.htm
© 1999 Macmillan Magazines Ltd
technical people from UK industries and
universities and organized them into panels
by industry sector. At the time, says Adams,
“we had a lot of good fundamental science
in catalysis, but we didn’t have vehicles to
do the first stages of engineering”. As a top
priority, the Foresight chemicals panel recommended the formation of a national
institute of applied catalysis to close this gap.
The original idea was to build new
premises. But the panel realized that this
might cost £20 million, says Adams, so
instead a virtual consortium was set up, with
Adams as director. “I wouldn’t say it’s completely run by myself from my lap-top computer, but it’s close to that.” There are 15
member companies, ranging from such
heavy hitters as BP/Amoco, ICI and Shell,
through Johnson Matthey, Air Products,
British Nuclear Fuels, British Gas Technology and Astro Zeneca, right down to some
quite small ones. The agreement, according
to Adams, was to build a community of scientists and technologists from industry and
universities with people trained in chemistry, chemical engineering, materials, modelling and computing.
“We insisted that research projects be
multidisciplinary and there has been tremendous response to this,” says Adams. Well over
£2 million has been put into the universities,
and the academics have responded favourably. “They get huge industrial input into
the projects, with lots of steering and management. We put in extra training for the
students on things like intellectual property,
project management and team working.”
Adams feels that IAC is one of the few groups
that are getting multidisciplinary approaches
and teamwork to function effectively.
It is impossible to do industrial chemistry without bringing together a variety of
disciplines, says Adams. With that in mind,
IAC has set up a formal education programme, the first leg of which is aimed at
postgraduates. The courses comprise industrial case studies, and are designed to be
highly participatory. “We get 30 young
chemists and engineers together for a week,
give them some real problems to work on,
and get them working through the night in
multidisciplinary teams,” says Adams. They
work over several different dimensions, he
says, from taking lab results and extrapolating them to the engineering side, to factoring
in economic and environmental effects.
Cleaner and cheaper
When asked what employers look for when
hiring people to do green chemistry, James
Bashkin, associate editor of the newly
launched Journal of Green Chemistry, says: “I
would look for the best trained person
in organic or inorganic chemistry with
the willingness to be non-traditional and
the ability to interact with people from
other disciplines.”
NATURE | VOL 400 | 19 AUGUST 1999 | www.nature.com
careers and recruitment
Before joining the faculty at Washington
University, Saint Louis, Bashkin developed a
reaction for Monsanto’s rubber chemicals
division that eliminated a step in a complex
process. This process produces 200 million
tonnes a year of an antioxidant rubber additive, which keeps rubber from ageing.
According to Bashkin, the use of this reaction has changed the global economy in the
business. “Not only did we eliminate a pollution problem, but we made the manufacture
more economical.” For this work, Bashkin
and his colleagues from Flexysis (a joint venture of Monsanto and Akzo Nobel) received
one of last year’s presidential Green Chemistry Challenge awards.
Traditionally, academic chemistry tends
to be an isolating experience, says Bashkin.
“You have to do your own work and you’re
dependent on yourself and your adviser. It’s
not necessarily good for one’s career to be
involved in collaborations early on.” But in
industry, he says, nothing is accomplished
without collaboration.
As a PhD student, you need to make sure
that there is a definable body of work that is
your own, which tends to work against collaboration. It is hard for untenured faculty members to collaborate, says Bashkin, owing to the
insistence that you develop your own professional identity. “I don’t think that’s necessarily
good for science,” he says. “In the modern
world, we can accomplish a lot more if we
allow ourselves to be influenced by others.”
The Center for Green Manufacturing at
the University of Alabama has won funding
from the US Department of Energy’s Office
of Industry. It was formed to build industry
leadership in the use of alternative reaction
and separation media in Alabama. According to Robin Rogers, a professor of chemistry
and director of the centre, workshops will
introduce plant managers to new technologies, such as room-temperature ionic liquids
as new media for carrying out reactions.
The future is green
Rogers believes that, unless greener technologies can be developed for chemical
manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies, there is no long-term future for those
industries in the United States. Companies
will simply move their plants to countries
with fewer regulations and lower costs for
waste disposal.
“When I was in graduate school in the
organic chemistry lab, I was graded on how
much product I had. That’s how I was trained
to think: maximize your yield.” But, says
Rogers, there are other aspects that must be
taken into consideration now and be taught
to students. “We can see that the future lies in
team approaches to problem solving and in
thinking about processes from a different
perspective.” He asks: “How many people in
science do you know who work with business
people when they develop the idea that they
want to pursue?” To address this, Rogers has
brought together colleagues from the school
of business, the college of engineering, and
Team player: Rogers at the site of new research
facilities for the Center for Green Manufacturing.
several of the sciences to expose students to
the complete cycle of process development.
According to Rogers, there are many
institutional and cultural barriers to overcome, and students must understand that
there are other factors besides chemistry that
go into solving a problem, whether in economics or engineering. “But how can my
students learn the true engineering needs by
being taught by just me?” Rogers believes
that, if students are involved in projects that
expose them to these other perspectives and
requirements, they will be better prepared
for the real world than chemists who are not
exposed to them until they reach industry.
Brendan Horton is a freelance journalist.
e-mail: [email protected]
Data explosion fuels search for drugs
Potter Wickware
In the data-driven world of drug discovery,
chemists should be comfortable not only
with new perspectives on their data but also
with new ways of relating to their fellow scientists. So says Steve Kaldor, director of
research at Eli Lilly, a large pharmaceutical
company which relies increasingly on
combinatorial chemistry for its efforts at
drug discovery. “Because many biological
targets have relatively poor validation states
as true drug candidates, it’s important to be
able to sift through assay data from many
simultaneous projects,” he says.
And, because chemists are increasingly
likely to be members of multidisciplinary
teams, perhaps as leader in one project and in
a supporting role in another, teamwork skills
are also more important than ever. “Chemistry used to be much more linear, both as it
was taught in school and practised in industry, but this is rapidly changing. The lone
wolf is a rarity now as a successful model for a
drug-discovery chemist,” says Kaldor.
Research strategies are also evolving
rapidly. Dave Hangauer, of the Department
NATURE | VOL 400 | 19 AUGUST 1999 | www.nature.com
of Medicinal Chemistry at the University
of Buffalo, New York
state, designs and tests
protein kinase inhibitors using smallmolecule libraries produced both by solution
and solid support synthesis. He explains
that, because the numKaldor: ‘develop data- ber of possible compounds in molecular
crunching skills’.
space is far too large to
screen, workable combinatorial libraries
depend on astute initial hypotheses to steer
the output towards a manageable subset.
“Structure-based design of combinatorial libraries is a nice example of hypothesisdriven science combined with data-driven
science,” he says. For example, when a library
of ligands modelled to contain tight binders
is assayed experimentally in a high-throughput screen, the molecular modelling
assumptions can be quickly tested and
hypotheses suggested. “The underlying science of predicting the free energy of binding
© 1999 Macmillan Magazines Ltd
in biological buffers is poorly developed, but
combinatorial methods allow experiments
to be pointed in promising new directions.”
The new techniques also highlight fruitful areas of investigation at the interface of
areas that may have been viewed previously
as distantly related, such as organic chemistry and genomics. Carolyn Bertozzi, a
biological chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, uses combinatorial library
screening to explore enzymes involved in
carbohydrate biosynthesis. She says: “In
drug discovery, small-molecule modulators
and genomic data are intertwined, so any
chemist who desires a career in research at
the chemistry/biology interface would benefit from training in genomic analysis.”
Because many drug targets are enzymes
from superfamilies, it is a major challenge to
develop small-molecule inhibitors that are
selective for one individual within a large
related group of targets. “If sequence
homologies could be correlated with potent
and specific inhibitor structures, useful
information could be obtained to guide drug
discovery and elucidate biological pathways.”
The library and high-throughput
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