The Glass is Always Greener on the Other Side
By: Andrew Warburton
Tags: Science Communication, Green Energy, Green Chemistry, Science, Environmentalism

My mom is an avid gardener, and by avid, I mean she has completely mitigated the need for a lawnmower in our petite yard after converting every usable piece of soil into a flower bed or a vegetable patch. She works day and night to maintain the garden, easily spending entire evenings on her knees pulling weeds or sowing new seeds. She puts in hundreds of hours of work just to see her flowers blossom for a few days and then wither away. Our front door is lined with red and blue hydrangeas complementing the palette of irises that extend towards our mailbox. Petunias, carnations, and roses color the side of the house like colored pencil shavings. In the back, a terraced hill with assorted wildflowers, pampas grass, and sedum carve out the boundaries of our property, maintaining a facade of organized chaos. I have never been much of a gardener, preferring to keep my fingernails clean and my hands un-calloused, and frequently questioned my mom for devoting her efforts into something so seemingly futile. Every time I asked her why she wastes so much time out in the garden, she simply replied “It’s your garden, too.”

Just 50 years ago, environmentally detrimental chemicals used ubiquitously throughout the United States were destroying our gardens. Chromates and mercury-based compounds were frequently dumped down the drain without any precautions. We were so focused on production and advancing technologies that we cared not for our precious planet. My hometown of Pittsburgh was so polluted and frankly disgusting that if you wore a white shirt in the morning, by lunchtime it would be black with soot and grime. Green chemistry changed the game by creating a paradigm shift: from raw production and gluttony to creative and conservative production with the Earth first. I’ll briefly introduce you to the major advancements green chemistry has had in our everyday lives including battery technology, toxic waste removal, and pharmaceuticals.1 These are tangible products that have changed your world to help keep our garden a little bit greener!

Green chemistry started in the 1960s when Pittsburgh’s very own Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, calling to attention the effects of DDT and other insecticides on local ecosystems. Since then, environmental conservation efforts have significantly improved in both local and governmental efforts with the establishment of the Environmental Protective Agency (EPA) and the promotion of recycling efforts throughout the US. Green chemistry has promoted the development of a plethora of environmentally safer consumer goods ranging from biodegradable plastics to cleaner air filters. Not only has green chemistry produced tangible goods, but it has also increased safety in industry and created thousands of jobs in the United States.

A fundamental development not only in green chemistry, but our lives since the turn of the twenty-first century is the development and increased usage of alternative energy sources. Recent advancements in green chemistry are low-cost and high power output organic-inorganic-based solar cells called perovskite solar cells are the successor to the traditional silicon solar cells — the ugly black slates atop peoples’ houses.2 These perovskite solar cells are cheaper and quicker to produce and can also be colorful, allowing them to capture the energy of different colors of light! Why not install a “stained-glass” window that will pay for itself and reduce your electricity bill!

Another huge advancement in alternative energy is the development of batteries. Most likely, you’re reading this on a device that runs on a battery (such as a laptop, smartphone, or tablet) and can attest to always wanting your battery to last just a couple minutes longer. The common battery now is the lithium-ion battery, which is notorious for the problems of overcharging and quick depletion. Through the research and development of green chemists, a new family of battery has emerged: the lithium-sulfur battery has been developed which can store four times more energy than lithium-ion batteries, which will let you listen to music the whole week without picking up your charger! The deployment and usage of lithium-sulfur batteries over lithium-ion batteries will reduce the amount of batteries put in landfills and recycling centers, making more room for beautiful gardens instead!

Green chemistry has also changed the game of reducing toxic and environmentally dangerous waste. Many chemicals such as PCB and CFC that were once ubiquitous in the consumer market, were banned due to their ruinous characteristics. Novel safe compounds have been developed to replace their deleterious ancestors before them. For example, FR3, a vegetable oil-based insulating fluid for voltage transformers has nearly completely phased-out PCB. It is not only safer for the environment (with a 55-times lower carbon footprint compared to PCB), but also is much less flammable and has a superior performance.1 FR3 has made transformers safer to work with and continues to keep the lights on in our homes! The impact of improving does not end with transformers, but extends to nearly every field ranging from reducing the amount of water it takes to make computer chips to designing enzymes used to reduce the waste created from making paper.

In your everyday life, green chemistry is helping you live healthier and safer by regulating carcinogenic chemicals in plastics. BPA, a commonly heard buzzword in the media is a chemical frequently used in plastics to increase their flexibility. However, you probably haven’t heard of BPA as a novel plasticizer, but rather as a health hazard, and rightly so. BPA is a known estrogen mimicking hormone, which means that it is so chemically similar to estrogen -– a female reproductive hormone — that the body responds to it like estrogen.3 In short, BPA passes the “duck test” for estrogen — it looks like estrogen, feels like estrogen, and acts like estrogen; therefore, it’s probably estrogen. Green chemistry has reduced the use of BPA in nearly all plastics by holding companies responsible for their health impact on society. Now, you can walk around and see BPA free products lining the shelves.

No one could report on the advancements green chemistry has made without mentioning its impact on the pharmaceutical industry. In fact, the pharmaceutical industry was one of the first fields to recognize the value of green chemistry back in 1996, and it continues to utilize green chemistry principles to reduce waste. Between 2004 and 2013, the U.S drug industry’s use of chemicals dropped by nearly half, showing how pharmaceutical companies are using less and selecting safer reagents for drug synthesis.1 The poster child drug for green chemistry is Viagra, for which Pfizer developed a completely new synthesis strategy that removed all the environmental pollutants and fire hazards from the process while also only generating a quarter of the original waste! Similar reduction methods have been applied to a myriad of drugs ranging from Ibuprofen (pain relief) to Taxol (anti-cancer)!

However, not everyone is a green chemist who will develop the next great solar panel or pharmaceutical drug — I’m sure not. It’s very easy to fall into a mindset that “since these great minds are making so many advancements, I can just relax and others will restore the garden!” or “I can’t do anything because I’m not a chemist.” You must escape from that mindset and embrace this opportunity to help our sick planet. The annual carbon footprint for the average American is around 20 metric tons and in 2015 alone. Carbon dioxide is the principle greenhouse gas that causes climate change. Rising carbon dioxide levels have a myriad of environmental detriments such as ocean acidification, increase in temperature, more extreme weather just to name a few! It takes a tree 40 years to sequester one ton of carbon dioxide. It would take every tree in Central Park over 110 years just to remove the carbon dioxide produced by the state of New York county in 2014.4

We can change. Humans are an incredible species that have learned to adapt to all sorts of challenges. We have climbed the highest mountain, seen the bottom of the ocean, and have even set foot on our moon! As a species, we have still to overcome our greatest challenge: ourselves. We must for an instant, set aside our desire for more and focus that energy towards benefiting our planet. Everyone can do it. Whether it is as drastic as installing solar panels to go off the grid or simply by turning off the lights when you leave, every little action counts and quickly adds up. Pittsburgh has been called the phoenix city for good reason — from the ashes of an old, inefficient steel furnace was forged a newer, cleaner city, focused on sustainability and technology.

The Earth is our garden, and she has flowered for us year after year, but recently, she’s been suffocating and just needs some tender love and care from her gardeners. We have beautiful flowers and vegetables we can plant in our dying garden to rejuvenate it. New battery and biotechnologies can be our vegetable garden to help sustain us. The pharmaceutical and green chemicals will be our flowers to help us color our garden. We need to stop lying to ourselves to say that everything will be okay; remove the rose-colored glasses and instead plant real roses! It’s time to pull the weeds of fossil fuels and plant the seeds of alternative energy to ensure future generations can enjoy a similarly beautiful garden!

References

1. Green Chemistry and Engineering : Towards a Sustainable Future Green Chemistry and Engineering : Towards a Sustainable Future.

2. Yang, Y. & You, J. Make perovskite solar cells stable. Nature 544, 155–156 (2017).

3. Food, I. & Authorities, S. International Food Safety Authorities Network ( INFOSAN ) BISPHENOL A ( BPA ) — Current state of knowledge and future actions by WHO and FAO. 1–6 (2009).

4. U.S. Energy Information Administration. Energy-Related Carbon Dioxide Emissions at the State Level, 2000–2013. U.S. Dep. fo Energy 18–19 (2015).