Going Green: A Step in the Right Direction

I just found out that on Friday, I get to reduce a ketone with carrots! For those of you that don't know what I'm talking about, or don't care about the actual chemistry, I am going to do an experiment in lab on Friday where I use carrots as a reactant instead of a chemical. Why is this important? Because it demonstrates the influence of Green Chemistry.

Green Chemistry started in the early 90's with the publication of this article by Paul Anastas and John Warner. It's basic mission is to prevent waste product, use safer materials, and use renewable resources instead of relying so heavily on petroleum. For example, glucose, the most common form of a sugar, can be used in certain reactions instead of benzene, which is highly flammable and toxic.

'So what?' you may ask. 'It's not going to change how things are now.' Well, that's where you're wrong. Ibuprofen used to be synthesized in 6 steps, resulting in large amounts of waste per kilogram of product synthesized (approx. 35 million pounds of waste each year). With the help of the American Chemical Society, the synthesis was shorted to only 3 steps, and most of the atoms in the reactants were all turned into ibuprofen, so overall, much less waste was created. You can find more about this here (click on the Sample Case).

The use of green chemistry not only helps the environment by producing less waste, but it is also very economical. Disposal of waste is expensive, so the less waste that is produced, the cheaper the reaction is. Plus, the more starting product is actually converted to the final product, the cheaper the final product is to produce in the first place.

But guess what? It doesn't stop at the industrial level. The University of Oregon has a completely green organic chemistry lab. Not only is the lab beautiful (check the slide show here), but it allows the students to run experiments on real scale. Again, for those of you that don't know what I'm talking about... in my organic lab, we use very small amounts of all the reactants, and produce small amounts of the products, as all our experiments (except for one last semester, I believe) are on the microscale. The small amounts I am talking about are mL of solvents, and milligrams of reactants. This makes it difficult to see the reaction proceed, and I would love to do a lab where I can actually see everything I am doing.

Plus, green chemistry helps your health. For those of you that drink decaffeinated coffee, methylene chloride, a known carcinogen, used to be used to extract the caffeine. With green chemistry, though, dry ice is put under high pressures to create a liquid, and the caffeine is extracted into that. Then the pressure can be released, and all the carbon dioxide will evaporate instantly into the air. (Sorry, I don't have a reference on this one... my professor just talked about it in class today).

So green chemistry is a step in the right direction towards saving our environment, and will likely be the future of all chemistry labs in developed countries.

Want to know more? Here's some more examples on new uses of green technology. Here's the top 10 ways that you can make your home greener. Here's even the top 10 ways to make your spending habits greener! Do it for the environment. Do it for your health. Or just do it to make yourself feel better.