incommunicado

Local news (and quite charmingly so), but it caught my attention because I had not seen the term 'green chemistry' before – must have missed it somehow. A rapidly-growing field, according to Walter Leitner, scientific editor of Green Chemistry: „Scientific publications addressing the field of green chemistry are emerging rapidly in many places. In the period 1999–2002, the number of publications with this key word has more than doubled every year and as of December 2003 over 1700 entries can be identified in SciFinder. Interestingly, this includes a significant number of patents and patent applications. Naturally, a large portion of these contributions deal with synthetic chemistry, but important areas such as life cycle assessment, toxicology, and green engineering are also at the heart of the development.“ The EPA's on top of it as well, and – not surprisingly – there is a manifesto as well as a network already... so there we go, another field to watch for developments relevant to what I would call the political ecology of (new) media, sz Goad, Meredith. „Scientists in New England attempting to develop 'green chemistry' specialty.“ Blethen Maine Newspaper (26 Oct 2004). Green chemistry -- to some people, it may sound like an oxymoron. But scientists who are trying to grow the specialty here in New England say that green chemistry could lead to more environmentally friendly plastics and pesticides, and new uses for wood products and lobster shells. In Maine, university researchers want to collaborate with Massachusetts scientists on turning waste wood products into new plastics and polymers. There is also interest in developing greener paper coatings with less-toxic chemicals for the pulp and paper industry. The concept of green chemistry, however, involves more than just a switch to materials that are not as harmful to the environment. It encompasses everything from the idea for a product to how it's produced and what happens to it at the end of its life. Green chemistry follows a dozen principles, including the idea that it is better to prevent waste now than to clean it up later, and that chemicals should be designed to minimize toxicity and ensure that it doesn't persist in the environment. "It's actually getting people and scientists, when they go into labs or when they're making things, to think green, to think of the environmental impact and put that as maybe the number one performance spec that we should look at," said Carl Tripp, a chemistry professor at the University of Maine who is active in the New England Green Chemistry Consortium, the first regional green chemistry group of its kind. Green chemistry is becoming more attractive to industries as a way to stay competitive, save money, and address head-on increasing demands that they take responsibility for the wastes their products leave behind. Legislatures in Maine and other states are demanding that electronics companies, for example, find a way to recycle the toxic e-waste in old computers, televisions and other products. Manufacturers of flame retardants are seeing some of their products banned because of concerns that they could be harmful to human health. "You've got to remember that a lot of these industries are under tremendous pressure to cut environmental pollution," Tripp said. "There's a cost with that now, and that cost will just keep going up. So the sooner they adopt these greener approaches, they'll be saving money in the long run." Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, has introduced legislation that would promote federal green chemistry research and development through a working group that includes the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The bill does not authorize any new spending. There is $500,000 in funding for the New England Green Chemistry Consortium tucked into the Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill, which was passed by the Senate Appropriations Committee in September. That funding would be seed money shared by the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the University of Maine, which are the lead institutions, and the universities of Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont. "To us, that's a foot in the door," Tripp said. "We're going to get things off the ground and hopefully show them progress and get more funding for this." In Maine, researchers hope to work with scientists from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst to develop polymers and plastics from waste wood materials, rather than oil. Those more natural products could then be used in the University of Maine's work with wood composites. Other examples of green chemistry are dry cleaners that use carbon dioxide to clean clothes instead of perchlorethylene and other solvents. Nontoxic paints are replacing tributyltin as an anti-fouling agent on boats. Even the chitin in lobsters and other shellfish could be used someday to make contact lenses and other polymers and plastics, said Paul Anastas, director of the Green Chemistry Institute at the America Chemical Society in Washington, D.C. There is the potential to develop a lot more products, he said. Green chemistry is being developed with the view that everything is a chemical. "Every plastic, every pharmaceutical, all of the things we raise food with, your clothes, your pens, your ink jet printers -- anything that you can see or hold in your hand can be affected by green chemistry," Anastas said. Martin Grohman, president of Correct Building Products and CorrectDeck, a Biddeford company that manufactures environmentally friendly decks, said that when he started making his product in 2000, it was tough to market a green alternative. Anything "green" was viewed as more expensive and not as attractive, he said. That's now changed. More people are interested in the fact that his decks are made of sawdust and plastic instead of rainforest trees, and have not been treated with chemicals. One of the principles of green chemistry is energy efficiency. Grohman said his business is undergoing a study to try to find ways to minimize energy use. "We don't have any emissions besides the natural gas-fired boiler that we use to make steam, and we're hoping one day to also eliminate that," he said. "There's not a waste stream coming off the side that we have to have treated. That's part of green chemistry, too."