Summary of two articles related to the roundtable discussion

In order to prepare for the roundtable discussion and the writing assignment, I read two articles about green chemistry.

The first one is the Kirchhoff’s article, Promoting sustainability through green chemistry. In the article, he claims that a collaborative effort by industry, academia and government is needed to promote the adoption of green chemistry technologies necessary to achieve a sustainable society. After giving us a brief introduction of sustainable development and some background information of green chemistry, he explains the idea from three aspects. First of all, from the academia aspect, academic research in green chemistry is very important and it provides basic knowledge, new products and well-educated manpower. He also talk about the applications of carbon dioxide solvent and catalysts. From the aspect of industry, we will obtain significant benefits from applying green chemistry technologies which reduce or eliminate hazardous substances form products and processes. For example in polymer industry, the use of methylene chloride can be eliminated by a melt polymerization process. Moreover, he mentions the importance of recycling and that green chemistry can also be applied into agriculture and bring us benefits. At last, government also plays an important role in promoting the adoption of green chemistry. Government can provide funds for green chemistry researches and education. Furthermore government could encourage the invention and development of green chemistry technologies.

The other article is Why We Need Green Chemistry. As the title says, the article explains why green chemistry is needed and show us that green chemistry technologies and principles are widely used now. The main ideas of the article are, though chemistry has improved our quality of life, and made thousands of products possible, our collective human health and the global environment are threatened by the hazardous substances of chemical products. Therefore an approach to the design, manufacture and use of chemical products to intentionally reduce or eliminate chemical hazards is needed, and this approach of chemistry is green chemistry. Furthermore, there are twelve principles of green chemistry which aim to prevent waste, design safer products, use renewable feed stocks, maximize efficiency, reduce or eliminate hazardous substances and so on. Because of these, we could get many benefits from green chemistry. Moreover, different kinds of applications of green chemistry are widely used nowadays such as the green paints, green plastic and green carpets. Green chemistry principles and technologies are being adopted by more and more companies, business departments and manufacturers.

After reading these two articles, I have a better understanding of green chemistry, and realize that it really should be adopted by many countries with a collaborative effort by industry, academia and government in order to reduce or eliminate hazardous substances in products, to obtain benefits without harming the environment, and to achieve a sustainable society.


5 relevant vocabulary words/phrases and their definition:

1. Green Chemistry: a chemical philosophy encouraging the design of products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances.
2. Sustainable Development: development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
3. Polymerization: a chemical process that combines several monomers to form a polymer or polymeric compound.
4. Catalyst: a substance that makes a chemical reaction happen more quickly without being changed itself
5. Feedstocks: raw material required for an industrial process.