The Green Chemistry for Climate and Sustainability Certificate Program launched this spring by the Yale School of the Environment aims to empower professionals with the knowledge and tools to advance global sustainable chemical innovation.
Chemistry touches everyone’s daily life — from food to pharmaceuticals to manufactured goods. Balancing product function with the pressing need for sustainable, safe, and effective chemicals is one of the largest challenges facing industry today. Toward that end, the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale (CGCGE) has launched a new online certificate program to equip professionals with the knowledge, tools, and skills to lead the way in implementing safer chemicals and processes in the commercial sector.
The nine-month Green Chemistry for Climate and Sustainability Certificate Program, which is supported by the Bataua Fund, is aimed a professionals who want to deepen their understanding of green chemistry and green engineering principles and champion ways to mitigate climate change and minimize the undesired biological and environmental impacts of chemicals in the Global South and industrialized nations.
“The challenges that we're facing in the world around sustainability, climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, all come down to the chemicals, the materials, the molecules that are the basis of our society and our economy. Green chemistry is not just understanding the problems, it's identifying and implementing the solutions,” said Paul Anastas, the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Professor in the Practice of Chemistry for the Environment and director of CGCGE.
More than 96% of all manufactured goods are connected in some way to chemical enterprise and chemical enterprise contributes $6 trillion to the gross domestic product of the U.S.
The challenges that we're facing in the world around sustainability, climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, all come down to the chemicals... Green chemistry is not just understanding the problems, it's identifying and implementing the solutions."
“This gives us a tremendous leverage point because if we can figure out how to address the impact of the chemical enterprise through green chemistry, we can make massive change at scale,” said Julie Zimmerman, professor at the Yale School of the Environment and the School of Engineering and Yale’s inaugural vice provost for Planetary Solutions.
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The program, taught by Zimmerman, who is deputy director for research at CGCGE, Anastas and Margaret Kerr, visiting professor and director of education at CGCGE, will explore the 12 principles of green chemistry with a focus on “turning theory into practice, and innovation into impact.” Participants will study a range of topics — from using carbon dioxide in products and fuels to biomimicry, which is designing degradable products based on nature’s processes. The program also will cover bringing green chemistry to fence line communities that have been burdened with chemical emissions from industry and manufacturing in ways that promote jobs and economic activity and prioritize health and wellbeing.
“This certificate will help professionals in the field do what they do better. So whether you think about how to grow food or how to move people and services, or how to produce pharmaceuticals or how to write the policies that influence those things, you will be able to do that in the frame of green chemistry so that everything we're doing is to benefit people and the planet while also thinking about profitability,” Zimmerman said.
The program is one of several new online certificate programs launched by the Yale School of the Environment, which range in focus from urban climate leadership to clean and equitable energy development. New programs focusing on environmental data and climate change communication are in development. Applications for the Green Chemistry for Climate and Sustainability Certificate Program opened March 1.
