Written by Joel C. Paredes / Special to the BusinessMirror

http://businessmirror.com.ph/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2053:thinking-green-in-business&catid=34:perspective&Itemid=62

That is really the glory of science—that science is tentative, that it is not certain, that it is subject to change. What is really disgraceful is to have a set of beliefs that you think is absolute and has been so from the start and can’t change, where you simply won’t listen to evidence.—Isaac Asimov, chemist, fictionist, futurist.

SCIENCE must be based on evidence, on facts. Men of science always try to make life better all the time. Yet sometimes, deeper studies down the line unearth effects that we did not foresee in our excitement for the new-fangled things. Science accepts this need for revisions and change when the evidence warrants it.

Current scientific evidence is clear—some of the products that made human life so much better and more comfortable through the years affected our world and our population in adverse ways.

This is what green chemistry is trying to address, even in the complex world of business.

Green chemistry, also called sustainable chemistry, was actually an innovative approach to applied science study in chemistry for an increasingly ecologically-challenged world.

Instead of trying to clean up the harmful effects of the products that we are piling up every second on our planet because of public demand for them, green chemistry posits that from the very start we should go for products and processes that do much less, or no more, additional harm.

The real innovation is the fact that green chemistry accepts the profit goals of business as a valid human activity and attempts to find a happy marriage between economics and the ecology through the pursuit of a responsible, chemistry-based modus operandi.

The Philippines has had its own share of developing pains.

Manufacturing industries caused the pollution of the air, land and waters. Extremely durable plastic products clutter up surroundings no end—just watch those Manila Bay cleanups on weekends. Even painting houses and buildings releases noxious solvents into the environment.

But should we now just stop manufacturing altogether? Or stop using plastics or paints?

Green is good business
In the Philippines, some forward-looking chemical companies have begun research and development along the new principles of green chemistry. They found viable chemistry-based solutions that hold the greatest business promise to some of these challenges.
Take highly-pollutant fossil fuels. At the turn of the century, in response to growing global concern over the polluting effects of petroleum diesel, Chemrez Technologies embarked on the development of a biodiesel sourced from the local coconut industry, a renewable plant source.

By 2005, its resultant coconut methyl ester or CME had complied with and even surpassed the most stringent standards of the World Wide Fuel Charter for biodiesel. By the time Republic Act 9367 (The Biofuels Law) was passed with an initial 1-percent biodiesel mandate in 2007, Chemrez was ready with a coconut-based solution.

Today, BioActiv, the Chemrez biodiesel brand line, is the largest selling biodiesel in the country, controlling more than 50 percent of the market.

When the biodiesel mandate doubles to B2, or 2-percent biodiesel, in February 2009, Chemrez is seen to gain an even higher market share as the only continuous-process biodiesel plant with the most consistent quality assurance program in the country. B2 will mean a biodiesel demand of at least 140 million liters a year.

The Department of Energy and the National Biofuels Board, which oversees the biofuels program, recently announced that in the face of highly volatile global oil prices they may even opt for a higher B3 blend, or more than 200 million liters of locally manufactured biodiesel a year starting next year.

For Chemrez, green chemistry indeed made really good business sense. It has helped develop plant-based, nontoxic and biodegradable degreasers and oil dispersants; and products that make plastics biodegradable and replace noxious solvents with water for the paint and resin industries.

A new idea
For decades, the response to the global concerns for pollution had been limited to band-aid, patch-me-up, after-the-fact solutions in cleaning up, or covering up, the ecological messes created by industry and development.

Industry couldn’t just stop producing the things we now enjoy and use even if we have already discovered the harm their production may present to our environment and people.

A new idea began to take root, simply because companies could not afford to stop producing them. Now, they have to make sure these products do less or no harm from the very start.

This slowly ushers in a rethinking of chemical design from the ground up.

In 1990, the United States even passed the Pollution Prevention Act, which officially introduced the idea of “prevention at the source” as an original and innovative way of dealing with the growing pollution the world was facing.

Paul Anastas, then of the US Environment Protection Agency and now of the American Chemical Society’s Green Chemistry Institute, and John C. Warner of the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, later developed and codified the “12 Principles of Green Chemistry” that further structured what the philosophy should mean in actual practice.

The principles cover such concepts as:
1. the design of processes to maximize the amount of raw material that ends up in the product;
2. the use of safe, environment-benign substances, including solvents, whenever possible;
3. the design of energy efficient processes;
4. the best form of waste disposal: do not create it in the first place.

“There’s not a regulatory bone in its body, because it’s about innovation and increasing profits while doing what’s best for the environment and human health,” says Anastas.

A solution-provider
Today, industries are starting to pick up on the green chemistry idea because they are getting familiar with the astronomical costs of cleaning up various forms of environmental mess.

For instance, Dupont had to pay fines and settlement costs in the United States of up to $600 million to cover environmental damage caused by the manufacture of Teflon and Gore-Tex.

Even after that huge penalty, Dupont could not just give up Teflon manufacture. Dupont scientists came up with a new process of making Teflon that foregoes the use of the nasty chemical that caused the mess in the first place, the PFOA.

Dupont put up a new $275-million facility in North Carolina using the new process of manufacturing Teflon in CO2 (instead of in water) without PFOA, in spite of the painfully recent mess. Presumably, the numbers still look good for Dupont after removing the threat of a huge fines.

As early as 1996, Dow Chemical also experimented on using supercritical carbon dioxide to replace the CFC and other ozone-depleting chemicals they were using as a blowing agent for polystyrene foam production.

Polystyrene is used in food packing and transport and seven hundred million pounds are produced annually in the US alone. The CO2 used in the blowing process is reused from other industries, so the net carbon released from the process is zero.

The supercritical carbon-dioxide worked as effectively without the need for hazardous substances, allowing the polystyrene to even be more easily recycled—less hazardous, more eco-friendly and more profitable.
Here in the Philippines, following its outstanding success with biodiesel, Chemrez went on to apply its expertise in green chemistry to help mitigate ecological problems.

As a solution to the Guimaras oil spill a few years back, Chemrez formulated an oil spill dispersant, Biosol Spill Rx. Plant-based, nontoxic and nonhazardous, it disperses oil spills in seas and oceans into tiny oil dispersions that then undergo biodegradation thus preventing water pollution.

Being locally produced, Biosol Spill Rx offers a much cheaper and more readily available solution to oil spills in Philippine seas and waterways.

Chemrez then shifted their guns to providing green chemistry solutions to the industries they had traditionally been serving.
Following numerous reports about the adverse effects of toxic solvent fumes on workers in molded figurines and fiber-reinforced plastics (used in the manufacture of boats, bathtubs, water tanks, and others), Chemrez laboratories developed Polycol Aqua.

It uses an innovative, environment-friendly chemistry which allows the resin to be extended with ordinary tap water instead of styrene monomer, an organic solvent which emits the hazardous fumes into the atmosphere. Again, a most cost-effective solution since water is a much cheaper solvent.

Another company, First In Colors, then looked at the growing problem of plastic clutter and developed Biomate. It is an additive in the formulation of conventional plastics, like polyethylene and polypropylene, to make such plastics biodegradable—it accelerates the breakdown of the chemical structure of the plastics.

The resultant broken down compounds are converted by microorganisms, for which these products are a food and energy source, into carbon dioxide and water; thereby returning otherwise intractable plastics to the ecosystem.

Biomate is now being used in the plastic shopping bags of our largest grocery and supermarket chains, making the bags biodegradable and less harmful to the ecology.

Looking further down the line in the use of foamed polystyrene as loose fillers for packaging as protective materials, First In Colors has also developed Bio-plast.
It is a starch-based biodegradable resin that is an ecofriendly replacement for foamed polystyrene, which is again a nonbiodegradable material that ends up being indiscriminately dumped into our natural environment.

The business possibilities are great and promising. But the speedy development of green chemistry is not without its challenges.

Raising the green flag
As an initial response, the private sector and government are launching the Chemrez Green Chemistry Awards during the Department of Science and Technology’s National Inventors’ Week on November 17-21, 2008 at the Petroleum Technology Transfer Council on Roxas Boulevard in Pasay City.

The National Inventors’ Week exhibits are held every two years by the Department of Science and Technology and its Technology Application Promotions Instituteto honor and promote local inventors and their inventions.
Sonia Salvador, spokesman for the awards, says that in honoring those who have begun to work under the new principles of green chemistry, they hope to encourage further research and development; and in taking cognizance of the work of high school and college students.

“We wish to imbed in their young minds the same green chemistry principles as a valid path to socially responsible business success,” she says.

The awards requires ‘significant impact’ from the qualified green chemistry entries. The entries with the more far-ranging industrial and technological applications and effects will therefore enjoy an added edge in winning the Chemrez Green Chemistry Awards.

According to Salvador, they have found some exciting new ideas among the entries. Admittedly, most of the entries are still in the infant stages of theory and development but she hopes that private companies can shepherd these ideas, which remain the intellectual property of their proponents, into business maturity and eventual production.
As the philosophy of green chemistry enters the awareness of both industry and the academe through the awards, its adoption should begin to take even deeper root and really take off. After decades of environmental destruction and human health hazards, not to mention the huge costs for cleaning up and paying regulatory fines, companies now see green chemistry not as just a fad or buzz words of activists, but as an intrinsic good principle of business.