Technologies

Technology Clusters

We group technologies that contribute to sustainability in chemicals into 8 technology clusters:

1. Sustainable design - Designing products to minimise environmental impact. Including use of lifecycle thinking in the design process and design for re-cycling and re-use.
2. Feedstocks - Use of unconventional feedstocks to substitute for non-renewable or hazardous materials.
3. Novel reactions - Development of novel routes to deliver the required product functionality.
4. Novel catalysis - New types of catalyst to increase selectivity, access new areas of chemistry, and to reduce energy consumption and waste production.
5. Solvents - Solvents represent the biggest pollution risk in many current processes. New processes are required that ensure solvents are properly contained, eliminated or replaced with environmentally benign alternatives.
6. Process improvement - Novel process routes that dramatically improve atom efficiency and energy consumption.
7. Separation technology - New, highly efficient and selective methods for extracting components from reaction systems.
8. Enabling technologies - A cluster of technologies that will underpin sustainability, including new measurement techniques, informatics and predictive modelling.

We plan to provide a critical overview of each key technology within each cluster covering:

• Definition of the technology and expected benefits
• Current status - industrial applications and academic research
• Potential impacts of the technology
• Unsolved problems and future prospects

Overviews will be added as time permits.

Green Chemistry and Chemical Engineering

The widely recognised criteria by which chemical technology is assessed as 'green' are the 12 Principles of Green Chemistry and 12 Principles Green Chemical Engineering proposed by green chemistry pioneers Anastas, Warner and Zimmerman.

A condensed form of these 24 principles has been developed as a mnemonic by Poliakoff:

Principles of Green Engineering			Principles of Green Chemistry
I	-	Inherently non-hazardous and safe	P	-	Prevents wastes
M	-	Minimise material diversity	R	-	Renewable materials
P	-	Prevention instead of treatment	O	-	Omit derivatisation steps
R	-	Renewable material and energy inputs	D	-	Degradable chemical products
O	-	Output-led design	U	-	Use safe synthetic methods
V	-	Very simple	C	-	Catalytic reagents
E	-	Efficient use of mass, energy, space & time	T	-	Temperature & pressure ambient
M	-	Meet the need	I	-	In-process monitoring
E	-	Easy to separate by design	V	-	Very few auxiliary substances
N	-	Networks for exchange of local mass & energy	E	-	E-factor, maximise feed in product
T	-	Test the life-cycle of the design	L	-	Low toxicity of chemical products
S	-	Sustainability throughout the product life-cycle	Y	-	Yes it’s safe

These are reproduced with the kind permission of the Royal Society of Chemistry from:

Samantha Y. Tang, Richard A. Bourne, Richard L. Smith and Martyn Poliakoff, Green Chem., 2008, 10, 276 - 277, DOI: 10.1039/b719469m

further reading:

P. T. Anastas and J. C. Warner, Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998, p. 30
P. T. Anastas and J. B. Zimmerman, Environ. Sci. Technol., 2003, 37, 94A.