Photo credit: Liisa Eelso
At a recent Nobel symposium, Yale’s Paul Anastas and an international array of scientific leaders called for structural shifts across science, policy, and education to advance sustainability goals that promote economic development while safeguarding health and the environment.
Scientists from around the globe gathered this week in Stockholm for a special Nobel symposium chaired by Yale School of the Environment Professor Paul Anastas. With a focus on green chemistry, the scientists issued a declaration May 23 on “Chemistry for the Future” urging scientists, industry, educators, students, and policymakers to collaborate to ensure that products of science are safe and sustainable by design. Noting that sustainable chemistry is fundamental to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the declaration states that “the chemistry of sustainability recognizes that sustainability without innovation is impossible and innovation without sustainability would be ruinous.”
Since their inception in 1965, the Nobel symposia have served to discuss scientific developments and pressing societal issues such as precision medicine, social behavior and global sustainability. This year’s symposium was organized by the Stockholm University Center for Circular and Sustainable Systems (SUCCeSS). Anastas, considered the father of green chemistry, was one of the leaders of the symposium. YSE News talked with Anastas, director of the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale (CGCGE), the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Professor in the Practice of Chemistry for the Environment, and Yale School of Public Health professor of epidemiology, about the historic declaration signed by Nobel Laureates.
The declaration outlines several crucial steps. These include ensuring that: design, development, and implementation of chemical products and processes proceed in a manner that integrates the goal of reducing or eliminating harm to people and the planet by design; that all parts of chemical enterprise acts now to recognize that the risk to people, prosperity, and the planet from inaction and preservation of the status quo is far greater than any risks that may be involved with transitioning to a ‘new chemistry for sustainability’ model; teachers, students and practitioners be trained to ensure the invention of new chemicals or chemical transformation integrates health, sustainability, and inherent safety as essential elements of performance and includes systems-thinking and lifestyle perspectives; chemical data is fully available and accessible; and government policies on chemical enterprises (such as tax incentives and subsidies) must be aligned with advancing healthful and safe chemistry.
It’s overdue. For years, chemists have been inventing, innovating, and discovering solutions to our greatest problems, and they need to be implemented now. We don’t need to be facing these crises. We don’t need to have a growing climate crisis. We don’t need to have a biodiversity crisis. We don’t need to have a forever chemicals crisis. We don’t need to have any of these things because we have the solutions.
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It’s about allowing and incentivizing the new business models, educational approaches, and government policies to prioritize implementation of revolutionary innovations. Gandhi once said that the difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing is more than enough to solve most of the world’s problems. The declaration outlines what we are capable of doing and the imperative of actually doing it.
We can convert CO2 from a problem to a solution by making it into valuable materials and carbon neutral fuels. We can get all the performance from plastic that you want without all the harm of long-lasting forever chemicals that contaminate land, water, wildlife, and oceans. It’s no longer about research. We have the treasure trove of solutions. Now we must commit to doing it. We need to implement these solutions to scale.
Green chemistry is the rule rather than the exception, meaning that all the materials that we use to generate everything in society is de facto designed for the ability to give superior performance without harming, depleting, or degrading humans or the biosphere. Green chemistry needs to be hard wired into investment, education, metrics and measures, and global frameworks.
