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Green chemistry, sustainability, and environmental impact | Loyd Bastin | TEDxWidener University

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  1. Transcriber: Lidia Anthony Reviewer: Shivanshi Rohatgi So imagine a world worked without air and water pollution.
  2. Imagine a world where environmental regulations were no longer needed. Does that sound impossible? Crazy?
  3. I hope to convince you that that’s not the case. That we as a society, if we embrace green and sustainable chemistry,
  4. can meet those environmental goals. My name is Loyd Bastin
  5. and I’m a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Widener University. And when I first started teaching, my students were asking me questions like,
  6. Why is the chemical industry harming our environment and our communities? Why are certain chemicals harmful to the environment and communities?
  7. And unfortunately, I had no answer. I hadn’t been exposed to that side of chemistry.
  8. I didn't know how to think about that chemistry. But fortunately for me, around that time, a call for a new workshop
  9. from the National Science Foundation on green chemistry came across my desk. It was like, what’s green chemistry? This sounds amazing.
  10. So I applied and I attended this amazing workshop at the University of Oregon, where I learned what green chemistry was
  11. and how it could change the way we think about the manufacturing industry. That workshop changed my life and my career path.
  12. I want to talk to you a little bit about how chemistry affects us on a everyday basis.
  13. Chemistry is part of everything that we do, every part of the day.
  14. Chemistry is responsible for all the products that we consume and use on a daily basis,
  15. whether those are pharmaceuticals, whether those are personal care products and cosmetics,
  16. whether those are plastic utensils and plates, whether those are all the components that go into the paints
  17. that we use on walls and cars and everywhere else, or whether that's the electronic devices that we are so dependent upon.
  18. Chemistry is responsible for producing all of those products. Chemistry is at the heart of how all of those products work.
  19. And so how do we think about that chemistry and that product? So I want to encourage you to think about the life cycle of a product.
  20. What goes into that product? First we have to extract raw materials from the Earth.
  21. We then have to manufacture and transform those chemicals into sometimes other chemicals and then eventually into our product.
  22. We then have to package that product, which uses additional chemicals that we have to extract from the Earth.
  23. Then we have to distribute that. Then we use that product and then we dispose of that product.
  24. What goes in and out of those processes, right? Typically, in a chemical, most of these products chemicals go in,
  25. lots of energy goes in. And what comes out to a chemist is called waste.
  26. To you it’s called pollution. Those are the inputs and outputs.
  27. This idea is known as system’s thinking. And it is thinking about the entire effect of a product's life cycle.
  28. So I want to walk through each of those pieces quickly. If we think about raw materials, most of our products are made of carbon.
  29. Plastics and pharmaceuticals, they all come from crude oil, right? And that crude oil has to be extracted from the Earth.
  30. If it’s not carbon-based, it’s probably metal-based. So much of our electronic devices are made of metals and other minerals
  31. that have to be extracted from the planet. Also in those electronic devices are a lot of carbon-based substances as well.
  32. So we're still relying on oil for those products as well. And unfortunately we’re using those natural resources
  33. much faster than the Earth can replenish them. And also, unfortunately, these materials
  34. are disproportionately located in communities of color. Let’s think about what happens once we have the raw materials.
  35. And we want to transform those raw materials into the products. We have to take the crude oil,
  36. we have to take that through a manufacturing and refining process to make the fine chemicals.
  37. Those fine chemicals have to be shipped to another manufacturing site where they are turned into the product.
  38. What comes out of that, most of the time is all chemical processes. Most chemical processes have waste associated with them.
  39. That's the pollution. That's what goes into our air and our water usually. And unfortunately, most of these chemical-manufacturing plants
  40. are disproportionately located in communities of color. All of this requires energy, lots of energy going into these processes.
  41. Where does that energy come from? Unfortunately, currently it comes from oil, natural gas and coal.
  42. All resources that are being used much faster than the Earth is replenishing them.
  43. Once the product is made, we distribute it, we use it. Then we have to dispose of it, right?
  44. And most of these products are carbon-based plastics, electronics. And we’ve created industries that recycle these products,
  45. as a way to reduce the amount of waste we are generating and have to dispose of. Unfortunately, we recycle plastics at about 30% .
  46. We recycle electronics even lower - 15% . And so what happens when we don’t recycle these materials?
  47. Well, they have to be disposed of. Most of them are disposed of either in a landfill
  48. or they are incinerated, burned at a facility. If they don't end up in a landfill or burned in an incinerator,
  49. then they end up as what we think of as trash, right? They end up on our streets and our water, on our beaches.
  50. And again, unfortunately, most of these disposal facilities are disproportionately located in communities of color.
  51. So this idea that our manufacturing industry disproportionately affects communities of color is not a new idea.
  52. This has been known for about 60 years. Doctor Robert D. Bullard coined the term “environmental racism” in the late 1970s
  53. with the idea that this placement of manufacturing facilities in communities of color
  54. was intentional. And he wrote an influential book called “Dumping in Dixie”
  55. that chronicled the fact that all of Houston’s garbage dumps are located in and around African American communities,
  56. despite the fact that only 25% of the population is of color. I wish I could tell you Houston was the only story where this was true.
  57. You may have heard of Cancer Alley. This is a part of Louisiana along the Mississippi River,
  58. between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where there are a large number of chemical manufacturing plants
  59. that take crude oil and turn them into those fundamental chemicals that we then use to make so many of our products.
  60. Those facilities are located in communities of color. And if you look at their cancer risk,
  61. their rates of cancer are substantially higher than the surrounding area, the state and most of the country.
  62. Miss Hazel Johnson is widely considered the mother of the environmental justice movement.
  63. She was born in Cancer Alley and became very aware early in her life
  64. the adverse health effects that these manufacturing facilities in neighborhoods caused.
  65. She got married, moved to Chicago, probably thought she was moving away from this,
  66. and, unfortunately, found the same thing in the South Side of Chicago. She became a major advocate for environmental justice
  67. in the West and South Side of Chicago, and, in fact, found out Chicago is probably even worse than Cancer Alley
  68. in the number of facilities in a very small area. And this is a problem around the world,
  69. from coastal Georgia to Staten Island, to Jacksonville, Florida, to Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, to Nairobi, Kenya.
  70. You can find these stories, unfortunately, all around the globe. One of those stories can be found in Chester, Pennsylvania,
  71. which is where Widener University is located. Chester, Pennsylvania, is about five square miles of land,
  72. just outside of the city of Philadelphia. And if you look at a map of Chester, Pennsylvania,
  73. along the Delaware River waterfront, about one square mile of land along that waterfront,
  74. there are four chemical plants, a paper plant,
  75. a water sewage treatment plant, and one of the largest trash incinerators in the country in that one square mile.
  76. If you look at the population, you’ll find that that portion of Chester is about 95% to 100% people of color.
  77. And right across the street from those houses are these manufacturing facilities. And then if you look at the asthma rates in those neighborhoods,
  78. they are substantially higher than even other parts of Chester and certainly the rest of Delaware County.
  79. So how do we address this? If we want to think about where does that risk come from?
  80. Where does that environmental and health risk come from? Well, it’s a function of your exposure to the chemical
  81. and how hazardous the chemical is. Traditionally we minimize risk by reducing exposure, right?
  82. If you work in the chemical industry, we have safety protocols. You have to wear your safety glasses and your gloves and your lab coat, right?
  83. If you live in a community, the Environmental Protection agency here in the United States is responsible
  84. for regulating how much of a chemical you are exposed to. This clearly is not working, right?
  85. So how do we think about a different approach? That's what green chemistry is.
  86. Green chemistry says we’re going to minimize the risk by removing the hazard.
  87. Seems simple, right? But it’s not quite that simple, right?
  88. We want green chemistry, want to reduce hazardous chemical use, reduce the amount of waste.
  89. And it's guided by these 12 principles that give chemists sort of a way to think about this.
  90. It also wants to reduce energy use and get our materials from renewable resources.
  91. And so I want to take you back to that product life cycle. What would happen if we could infuse
  92. green chemistry thinking into each of those steps, right? Well, if we were to develop new processes and products
  93. that use starting materials that come from renewable sources, that would reduce the need for extracting new raw materials from the Earth.
  94. If we were to develop processes that generate less hazardous waste and use less hazardous chemicals,
  95. that reduces pollution from the manufacturing process, that also reduces the hazards of the manufacturing process
  96. and accidental spills in nature. If we develop biodegradable products that don't accumulate in nature,
  97. that reduces pollution from disposal, that puts less waste into our landfills and incinerators,
  98. which are also polluting the environment. And if we develop processes that reuse and recycle materials,
  99. this is going to, again, reduce the extraction of natural resources and reduce pollution from that disposal.
  100. So we need to think about how we can reuse and recycle materials. This is known as the circular economy.
  101. One person’s waste can be another person’s raw material. We have to find a way to reward that system
  102. and reuse and repurpose the waste. So I want to tell you about one of my favorite examples
  103. of a sustainable innovation. I’m going to tell you about the story of Tide.
  104. Some of you might be old enough to remember that Tide was sold in cardboard boxes and was a powder, right?
  105. That powder was really inefficient. It would not dissolve fully in the water.
  106. So you might use warm water or hot water, right? It would cause this white film on your washer
  107. that you’d have to use another chemical to clean away, right? Really inefficient.
  108. It was also in cardboard, which at the time we were using a lot of paper. So Tide wanted, Procter and Gamble wanted to think about
  109. how can we improve that product? So they created a liquid version of the detergent.
  110. In doing so, they had to go away from cardboard, and so they moved to plastic. Maybe not the best decision in retrospect, but it was progress at the time, right?
  111. And that liquid formulation did several things for Tide. It allowed them to, over time, concentrate the detergent.
  112. So it went from 1x to 2x to 3x. And I think we’re now at 4x. And so that reduces the amount of plastics you needed for that packaging.
  113. This was very intentional on their part. So instead of getting 100 washes
  114. you might now get 200 washes out of that bottle. Unfortunately, not everybody realized this was happening
  115. and they didn’t know what concentration they were buying, right? And we'll come back to that.
  116. But they also realized that that liquid also was much more efficient in dissolving in water,
  117. but it still did require hot water to get certain things out of your clothing. So they wanted to eliminate that heat, that energy use.
  118. So they developed, you might remember Cold Water Tide where all of your washes could be done in cold water,
  119. that product no longer exists. Why, you ask?
  120. Because all of their detergents work just as well in cold water as hot water. If you take nothing else away from this,
  121. remember, you don’t have to wash your clothes in hot water. They weren't happy with this, so they continued to innovate
  122. because up until now, every chemical in this product came from oil. And so they wanted to make a change there.
  123. So they created this product, Tide Pure Clean, which I use. So totally plant-based, plant-sourced.
  124. About that time, they also addressed this idea that no one knew how much detergent to actually use.
  125. So they created Tide Pods, right? Because Tide Pods deliver the perfect amount of detergent each time.
  126. Not plant-based chemicals, however, right? So you might think, what are they doing now?
  127. I hope that they're thinking about biodegradable polymers for those pods. I hope that they’re thinking about more products being plant-based.
  128. But maybe some company out there is going to figure out we don’t really need to wash our clothes.
  129. What if the clothing would just naturally resist the dirt? Sounds crazy? Sounds impossible?
  130. We have athletic gear that does it already. We have athletic gear that is sweat-wicking, right?
  131. We’re getting there. We’ll get there. How fast? I don’t know.
  132. So you might be saying, well, I’m not a chemist. So what can I do? Well, I hope I can implore you that in order to incorporate
  133. the green chemistry principles into the chemical process, we need everyone, right?
  134. We need educators that will teach the next generation of scientists about green chemistry.
  135. But not just chemists, right? We need everyone to know about green chemistry.
  136. We need to create laws and regulations that support green technology, green chemistry innovations and circular economies.
  137. We need to ensure that everyone is aware of green chemistry and how it can be utilized to create a sustainable future.
  138. We need our activists, we need our politicians, and we need our citizens to know about green chemistry
  139. and advocate for these laws and regulations at the state and national level.
  140. You might say, well, I don’t know if I can do all of that. But you can do this on an everyday basis as well.
  141. We can reduce the amount of waste going into landfills and being burned in incinerators
  142. by composting, by reusing products, by reducing our use of products and by recycling.
  143. So I hope you'll join me in creating a greener future. Thank you. (Applause)

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