Green Chemistry

Funding Acknowledgements

The writing of this book was funded as a part of the project “Green Chemistry avant la lettre: historical and epistemic underpinnings of sustainable practices in chemistry and chemical industry” carried out as the Sonata 16 grant No. 2019/35/D/HS3/00614 of the Polish National Science Centre.

Introduction

Green chemistry is one of the most successful sustainability-related concepts of the last few decades. New introductory textbooks devoted to this pioneering field appear on a regular basis. Academic courses or even fully fledged degrees in green chemistry are designed in an increasing number of leading global universities. The funding agencies all around the world pour hundreds of millions of dollars into green chemistry research, not to mention private R&D investments of major companies trying to ‘green’ their practices in the eyes of the public. Green chemistry is at the heart of long-term development plans of entire nations and international organizations such as the OECD and the United Nations. The sheer number of articles tagged with the “green chemistry” keyword is overwhelming and grows exponentially every few years. The popularity of the concept in the world of science is unquestionable.

So what exactly is green chemistry? Someone not familiar with the concept may feel that green chemistry is undoubtedly something good. The colour green is often associated with nature or the environment; green research or policy projects are the ones that revolve around health, well-being, sustainability, and positive emotions. Green chemistry is therefore certainly a ‘feeling-good chemistry’ and an ordinary citizen may be perfectly content with the fact that this line of research is gaining so much attention recently. If someone tried, however, to go one step further and dig deeper to find a precise definition of green chemistry, the inquirer would encounter a mass of confusing literature with definitions as numerous as they are vague. Chemists agree neither on what type of ‘object’ green chemistry is (discipline, subdiscipline, paradigm, method?) nor what it deals with (pollution prevention, toxicity, renewable materials, some of them, all of them?), not to mention that its relationship to other disciplines or ways of thinking (sustainability, sustainable chemistry, industrial ecology, environmental chemistry, circular economy, etc.) is far from well-established.

Green chemistry is an imbroglio of theories, methods, institutions, ideas, and especially narratives, whose meaning evolve dynamically. Green chemistry in 1996 (the year of the first Green Chemistry Challenge Award attributed by the US government) is certainly different than the one in the early 2020s, not just because of the accumulation of novel empirical results, but because the frontiers of the concept shifted. What is particularly striking about this evolution is the epistemological self-awareness of green chemistry practitioners; no other ‘discipline’ generated so much self-reflection on its own foundations. Indeed, chemists ←21 | 22→working in the field perfectly see difficulties with its fuzzy boundaries. Every year a cohort of new theoretical articles, introductory chapters, press publications, and official manifestos attempt to recast the history and the underpinnings of the green chemistry project in order to define it in a new way. Descriptive and normative aspects are never fully dissociated in these publications. Many authors write the history of green chemistry in a given way to justify their own vision of the of the field.

A few words on methodology

From the methodological standpoint, the book makes use of what sociologists call the “discourse analysis,” an intuitive methodology for reading texts of culture insisting on the fact that no hierarchy of sources is fixed once and for all and that every study object needs an individual appreciation to identify relevant discourse-formative elements.¹ In this book, I mostly study and analyse articles, editorials, and book chapters explicitly defining (or trying to define) green chemistry and similar concepts. As previously mentioned, these publications are very numerous. A search in the Scopus database returns around 30 000 articles with the term green chemistry in their abstracts, titles, and keywords, or in the name of the journals that published them. Even if only 1% of them tried to define green chemistry in some way, the number still amounts to 300 papers. And it does not include many important books and early articles that have not been indexed in Scopus, it does not include non-English speaking publications, and it does not include definitions from various official websites. Since the sheer number of these documents is impressive, I had to identify the protagonists of the green chemistry history, as well as the key fora where the debate takes place, in order to select the texts I focus on. Not every definition is equally influential. And yet the definitions coming from less prominent and younger scholars can also be precious in the sense that they provide us hints on how the notion was being rebuilt and appropriated over the years and may indicate where it is going in the future. There is no straightforward way to introduce all these texts at the same time and I justify the choice of this or that document on an individual basis. In a certain way, this book constitutes an informed commentary to these various scholarly works.

Two objections against this approach may be raised at this point. Firstly, it may appear somewhat artificial to separate short bits and pieces defining green chemistry from the main body of different scientific texts that often advance informed arguments on much more specialized topics. However, the purpose of my study is not to paint a broad picture of every single subject that has been labelled as green chemistry and even less to engage in much more complex scientific debates. At the heart of the endeavour is the term green chemistry itself in its multiple declinations over the years.

If someone tried to position this work among the already established methodological frameworks of history of science, it stems, to an extent, from the ←24 | 25→philosophy of the French historian Jacques Roger.2 Roger brought into the history of science the methods of the French Annales School well-known for its work on the history of mentalities: the overarching representations of the world in which people live and with which they interact. The history of green chemistry is above all the history of the mentalities of scientists interacting with their objects of study, contextualizing them, and explaining their research choices. I could simply call it a paradigm, but the use of the word ‘paradigm’ in a history of science book may suggest that the author means the term in a sense given to it by Thomas Kuhn, which is not the case.³ Green chemistry is not (or at least not yet and not only) a Kuhnian paradigm. The concept of scientific mentalities is more helpful, but again, these methodological debates should not detract us from the core narrative of the book and are not needed to understand its message.

At the same time, this book can also be seen through the lenses of the recent literature on the history of various sub-disciplines of chemistry; a topic that has been recently gaining more and more attention.⁴ However, above all, it is simply a history book exploring the complex knowledge panorama of the twenty-first century, which is characterized not only by transdisciplinarity, but also by constant transgressions between the scientific and the social. The choice of a more specific reading framework would narrow down the definition of green chemistry, while the entire purpose of the book is, precisely, to indicate the plurality of meanings and the internal contradictions and paradoxes in the way the term is used.

The input of the humanities and social sciences

While the problems with the green terminology in chemistry have been thoroughly explored by scientists themselves, green chemistry also attracted a certain ←25 | 26→interest of scholars in STS (science and technology studies or social studies of science), historians, economists, and philosophers of science. They all tried to take a step back in order to delineate the object of their studies from a broader perspective and to contribute to the general debate on what green chemistry is and should be, often highlighting these elements which chemists tended to gloss over and ignore. Interestingly, while some of these social scientists present a rather optimistic and enthusiastic view of the field, calling it occasionally outright revolutionary,5 others are more reserved⁶ and even sceptical about the concept of green chemistry.⁷ A quick observation suggests that enthusiasts were more interested in the normative power of green chemistry, whereas sceptics were those who conducted more empirically-oriented studies on the concept.

One of these studies deserves an explicit mention. In 2006, an STS scholar with a background in chemistry, Jody Roberts, wrote a Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Creating Green Chemistry: Discursive Strategies of a Scientific Movement.”⁸ Roberts explores the origins of the concept in the US and the way it was formulated, understood, and disseminated. He relies on an extensive bibliography, interviews, as well as on his own experiences from a green chemistry summer school in 2004. Interesting, rich, but also critical in a stimulating way, Roberts’s dissertation constitutes one of the most insightful works on the history and epistemology of green chemistry up to date. In my work, I agree with his dissertation’s key assertions, I build upon them, and often reuse Roberts’s arguments.

Table 1: Some ways to think about green chemistry expressed in the literature