Environmental impacts, green

Green product design is about reviewing the entire life-cycle of a product or service from sourcing all the raw materials needed, to ultimate disposal at the end of life. Looking for opportimities to improve performance, reduce costs and reduce environmental impact. 

To successfully carry out green product design, it is important to be able to properly describe the baseline case, the environmental impact of current methods of achieving a particular goal, and to be able to compare alternative options for achieving that goal. 

The percentage of the overall impact allocated to each stage of the life-cycle can then be displayed as a simple bar chart. This allows attention to be focused on the stage with maximum environmental impact, where green product design will have most effect. 

The progress of Green Chemistry impacts the established scenarios for the chemical industry (98,99). Future catalysts will likely become more enzyme-like in the sense that they will more efficiently balance the properties of effectiveness and fragility. An overarching environmental consideration holds a synthetic catalyst should simply go away by some mechanism when its work is done. Nature has developed enzymes with limited lifetimes. After their task is completed, their constituent molecules and atoms become recyclable to serve as useful resources for the... 

Finally, one of the better books to analyse the environmental impact of petrol is Green Chemistry An Introductory Text by M. Lancaster, Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, 2002. 

Nevertheless, the new market order also opened up opportunities for utilities to deal with environmental problems. Experience from other countries with deregulated electricity markets showed that consumers are willing to pay extra for electricity with low environmental impact. A number of incumbent electric utilities, as well as newly emerging green power marketers, began developing green power products to differentiate themselves from other suppliers [11]. 

Another common theme that authors use to establish importance involves environmental impacts. For example, an environmental slant is used in the first sentence of the cyclodextrin article (P3, exercise 6.7), where the study of cyclo-dextrins is justified based on their role in soil remediation. The importance of work that benefits air or water quality and/or promotes green chemistry can also be stressed. Work is also viewed as important if it has cross-disciplinary applications. For example, in the Introduction section of the tetrazole article, the authors stress the importance of tetrazoles in coordination chemistry, medicinal chemistry, and in various materials science applications and point out their role as useful intermediates in the preparation of substituted tetrazoles ... 

Tools for early design assessment to predict environmental properties, investigate green chemistry alternatives, and design molecules with lower environmental impacts. 

Buchanan, D. J. Brenkley, D. 1994. Green coal mining. In Hester, R. E. Harrison, R. M. (eds) Mining and its Environmental Impact. Royal Society of Chemistry, London, 71-95. 

Green chemistry utilizes the information that is now available to the scientific community about the toxicity and other hazards posed by certain chemicals. Through a combination of knowledge of the nature of a chemical s hazardous properties with the ability to manipulate the chemical s structure, chemists possess the ability and skill to mitigate the hazard. Selection of a solvent should be based not only on any hazards that the chemical may possess, but also on existing environmental problems that its use may exacerbate. Selection of solvents needs to optimize the utility of the solvating material and minimize its environmental impact. 

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