Environmental responsibility, chemists

This book should have broad appeal to chemists and others concerned with the manufacture and use of chemical products in an environmentally responsible manner. Certainly, basic researchers from academia, industry, and government should find the specific results and methodologies both useful and thought-provoking. The techniques and tools discussed in this book should also be of interest to those decision-makers who determine which syntheses will be used to manufacture chemical substances. In many ways, the message of the book—that dramatic advances can be made in pollution prevention by using the talents of synthetic chemists— is as important as the research itself. 

These choices must be made after careful analysis of the trade-offs that need to be made in the decision of how to synthesize a new chemical substance. While it is easy to state, correctly, that it is imperative to minimize the use and generation of substances which pose a hazard to human health or the environment, only those individuals qualified to fully understand the nature of the choices can be relied on to make those choices responsibly. This is precisely why the synthetic chemist will play an increasingly important role in allowing the chemical industry to discover and commercialize technical innovations. These innovations will need not only to maintain and improve on the quality of current products but also to develop new synthetic methods for these products to be made in a less costly and environmentally responsible manner. These principles will need to be built into the development protocols of new chemical products as well. 

This book provides an opportunity for several chemists who are pioneers in the field of benign by design chemistry to present their basic research. We hope it will inspire many more chemists to become involved in creative environmentally responsible chemistry as it becomes the topic of more research and then moves further into industrial practice. Chapters in this book discuss the conceptual basis for benign chemistry and a wide range of research embracing this approach. 

The folding and intertwining processes can be modulated by exposing the duplexes to different chemical environments, e.g., solvent, temperature, and guest molecules. These phenomena inspired chemists to modify the duplexes as a means to understand environmentally responsive cooperativity. 

Chemists are now starting to demonstrate that we have viable alternatives to the use of toxic and dangerous elemental halogens, or that when these must be used we now have strategies to handle them in a safe and environmentally responsible way. 

Of all the societies founded by the chemical industry during this period, none was more concerned to show social and environmental responsibility than the Newcastle Chemical Society, which was established in 1868. The reason for this may have been that many of the society s leading members combined their activities as captains of industry with key positions on the local town councils. In addition, membership was not limited to manufacturing chemists, but included other chemical professions, educators and medical men. From the beginning, spokesmen for the society emphasised that the duties of chemists included finding solutions to problems of waste utilisation and pollution. Isaac Lowthian Bell, the society s first president, acknowledged the special responsibilities of the chemical industry with regard to the local community s air quality ... 

Functional gronps provide the relationship between the chemical structure and the compound activity. Often, the physical properties of similar types of molecules may be related, and thus it is possible to substitute an undesired molecule for a less hazardous one. These structure-activity relationships give the green chemist the opportunity to tune the molecule to achieve a more environmentally responsible process. For example, the use of a solvent from the same functional group but of a higher molecular weight may prove advantageous if the volatility of the solvent is a concern. Specifically, diethanolamine is seen to be a better solvent for CO capture than is monoethanolamine because of its reduced volatility. 

No chemist can be unaffected by these reports. Some chemists wish to discount the impact of the extensive list of chemical hazards, so they concentrate on one or two misnomers or inaccuracies by health and environmental advocates. Other chemists might assert that to some degree all have contributed to the production, promotion, and consumption of these chemicals. Every chemist, however, bears some responsibility... 

Ms. Debra Y. Harton, Assistant Chemist, assisted in the laboratory work. Overall supervision of the project was the responsibility of Dr. William J. Barrett, Director, Applied Sciences Research, and Dr. Herbert C. Miller, Head, Analytical and Physical Chemistry Division. Other personnel of Southern Research Institute provided valuable advice. These include Ms. Ruby H. James, Head, Environmental Analytical Chemistry Section Dr. Thomas P. Johnston, Head, Pharmaceutical Chemistry Division and Dr. Edward B. Dismukes, Senior Research Adviser. This work was conducted under contract with NIOSH (210-78-0012) ... 

How heavy this responsibility is, resting on the shoulders of the analytical chemist He is the one who, in the first place, is responsible for the forced closing of a dioxin-delinquent waste incineration plant, for the approval of a new non-persistent pesticide, for the demotion of an athlete from his Olympic title for having used illegal drugs, for the identification of a criminal by the traces of gunpowder on his hands, for the quantification of environmental contaminants, for the detection of diabetes, or the detection of poisoning, for the establishment and the enforcement of standards used in world trade. The analyst, with his power to say yes or no , is one of the most influential of our contemporaries ... 

In spite of these difficulties with DOM chemistry, environmental chemists are frequently asked what molecular structures within the mixture are responsible for contaminant binding, haloform production, light attenuation, protonation characteristics, and other problems of environmental relevance. The chemist usually hypothesizes that DOM features such as aromaticity, polarity, functional-group content and configuration, molecular interactions, and molecular size can explain the observed phenomena. However, models of DOM (or DOM-fraction) structures must be based on average-mixture analyses to support these hypotheses. Such models represent average properties of thousands to millions of mixed compounds. 

The search for relationships among the dynamic and equilibrium properties of related series of compounds has been a paradigm of chemists for many years. The discovery of such unifying principles and predictive relationships has practical benefits. Numerous relationships exist among the structural characteristics, physicochemical properties, and/or biological qualities of classes of related compounds. Perhaps the best-known attribute relationships are the correlations between reaction rate constants and equilibrium constants for related reactions commonly known as linear tree-energy relationships (LFERs). The LFER concept led to the broader concepts of QSARs, which seek to predict the environmental fate of related compounds based on correlations between their bioactivity or physicochemical properties and structural features. For example, therapeutic response, environmental fate, and toxicity of organic compounds have been correlated with... 

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