Greener World

While strategies like metabolic engineering offer great promise for spawning new medicines, other areas of chemistry aim to clean up the Earth, improving people s health by ridding the air and waters of pollutants. 

This feature, something Collins calls dial-a-life-time, permits scientists to control how long the catalysts stick around before they self-destruct. 

All chemical reactions involve the conversion of starting materials (called substrates) into products. Catalysts are molecules that make reactions go much faster than they would on their own. By definition, catalysts are facilitators—they themselves are not used up in the reaction and can be re-used. In industrial reactions—say, the manufacture of ammonia—catalysts can be a mix of simple molecules such as iron, potassium, oxygen, and aluminum. Your body s catalysts are enzymes. Some enzymes make the reactions taking place in your body occur up to a trillion times faster than they would without any help Enzymes are therefore essential to life, since your body cannot afford to wait days, weeks, or years to receive the important products of biochemical reactions. 

The enzyme methane monooxygenase converts methane into methanol, producing water as a byproduct. 

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Paladini, V., Miotti, P., Manzoni, G., Ozebec, J. (2003). Conception of modular hydrogen storage systems for portable applications. In "Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Conference. Towards a Greener World", Vancouver June, CDROM, 12 pp. Published by Canadian Hydrogen Association and Fuel Cells Canada, Vemcouver. 

A key factor in reducing indoor air pollution is an improvement in public information. To increase public awareness of how individual activities and consumer choices affect the environment could make cleanup efforts more successful. More pubhc information is also helpful to keep the public interested in current environmental issues and to foster their sense of responsibility to work for a better and greener world. It would also increase public pressure for pollution reforms, which would in turn leverage more money from the government for emission controls and environmental cleanups. 

Markets are becoming more interdependent, global, and sophisticated. Corporate social responsibility and sustainability are emerging as key requirements for doing business in a greener world. 

Undergraduate Textbooks Chemistry in Context Real-world Cases in Green Chemistry Greener Approaches to Undergraduate Laboratory Experiments American Chemical Society Kathryn Parent... 

In order to help insure that we develop a sustainable world, it is imperative that we bring the tenets of sustainability to the people of the planet. As chemists, we can have a considerable influence on the progress that we make toward this goal by both what we practice and what we preach . We must view all chemistry with the goal to make it greener. In order to implant this view in a student s psyche, it is necessary to infuse green chemistry across the curriculum. Educators need to look at all the materials (particularly textbooks) they use, and consider how they can infuse sustainable chemistry into the discussion. 

POI 11] PoiZOT P., Dolhem F., Clean energy new deal for a sustainable world from non-C02 generating energy sources to greener electrochemical storage devices . Energy and Environmental Science, vol. 4, p. 2003, 2011. 

As new greener bulk industrial selective oxidation processes using H2O2 and Ti zeolite-like catalysts have been established (e.g. for producing caprolactam, dihy-droxybenzenes and propene oxide), or are in an advanced development stage (phenol), we can forecast that an increased amount of H2O2 will be needed in the near future. Current worldwide demand for hydrogen peroxide is close to 2 Mt/y and about 0.2 Mt/y would be needed for one propene oxide, or phenol, world-scale plant. 

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