Sustainability in General

Gandhi is the one who continuously rejected the Western model of development, who once said it took the exploitation of half the globe to make Britain what it is. How many globes would it take India to do the same It was later, that this was answered indirectly, by Brundtland, the Chair of the World Commission on Environment and Development, who stressed that humanity would need ten Earths to allow all humans living on Earth to reach to Western levels of consumption [5]. 

Whenever proper sustainability is achieved, certainly there will be more care for the pollution and toxics as well as the health related issues in connection with plastics and rubbers. Hence, sustainability is very important to reach an end of the possible health problems encountered with plastics and rubbers. 

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It was emphasized in the past that the development of catalysis was the result of a sort of push-pull interaction. Catalysis is crucial for modern chemical industry, and contacts between laboratories and industry are generally intense. The problems industry is faced with can stimulate (or should stimulate more) research in Academia (the pull effect). On the other hand, new ideas and discoveries in Academia are one (modest) factor that contributes to push innovations in industry. Stronger incentives to innovations result from the considerable influence that energy and raw materials cost, environmental protection, sustainability in general, and profitability exert on industrial developments. Catalyst preparation is one aspect of catalysis where this push-pull effect has, or should have, a particularly strong influence. The present contribution, inspired by the Promising Scientific Avenues challenge, will therefore attempt to be close to the spirit of the symposium title. 

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