THE TOWN NAME ‘BHOPAL’ equates to ‘corporate chemical disaster’ for many people. In 1984, toxic gas escaped from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in India and immediately killed more than 2,000 people as they lay sleeping in their homes. Thousands more died in later days; hundreds of thousands suffered the effects of the noxious cloud.

When chemistry goes wrong, as it did so famously in Bhopal, there is a temptation to position use of chemicals as one of ‘good versus evil’. But to reduce pollution and eliminate toxicity from everyday products, the reality is that chemistry offers a way of designing out hazards, starting at a molecular level. That’s why, in 2013, chemists are talking more and more about ‘green chemistry’.

“Green chemistry asks: how do we make the chemicals and molecules we use in our daily life in a more benign way?” says Monash University’s Professor Milton Hearn, director of the Victorian Centre for Sustainable Chemical Manufacturing. It’s a shift in thinking which Hearn says has the potential not just to change our products, but our perceptions.

“Everything about our lifestyle is totally conditional on our access to chemicals, from laptops and mobile phones to medicines and safe foods. With more uptake of green chemistry we won’t be in the situation where the public says the industry has damaged the globe,” he says.

One of the proponents of green chemistry says changing chemistry for the better is a matter of training chemists to think differently. John Warner, co-author of Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice says, “We pat [chemistry graduates] on the top of the head and say ‘go out and invent the future’. [But] it’s very unlikely they’ll have ever had a course on what makes a molecule toxic, or have ever been trained on what makes molecules harm the environment.

“Every time you hear a story about a red dye that causes cancer, or a plasticiser that causes birth defects, it’s no wonder that happens. There’s nothing built in the education of a chemist that prepares them to be aware of that,” he says.

Part of the problem, says Warner, is a flawed approach to what gets attention in scientific circles.

“The road to success in science is to show you have dominance of the world around you [and] that you have forced molecules to do things you want them to do. It’s deeply rooted in the human psyche that we dominate nature…[and] over 150 years of modern chemistry, we have worshipped and glorified the ability to dominate and force things to happen the way we want,” he says.

Of course, chemical reactions occur continually in nature. But as Warner points out, those mostly happen at room temperature, using water as a solvent. “Nature doesn’t force molecules.”

“Green chemistry asks: how do we make the chemicals and molecules
we use in our daily life in a more benign way?”

The 12 Principles of Green Chemistry contained in Warner’s book are now widely promoted by chemistry societies across the globe and Warner is regularly flown across the world to talk about them years after the book’s first publication. “The reaction was unexpectedly massive,” he says.

However Warner believes green chemistry principles are all very well, but where they are actively employed is most interesting.
For example, he says, a recent green chemistry discovery worked out how to change the molecular structure of grey hair back to its original state.

Milton Hearn refers to the scientist who worked out how to develop paints and coatings from vegetable oils, rather than petrochemicals. Traditional paint releases gases which have been linked to respiratory disease and cancer, but the vegetable based paints do not. “The technology was picked up by a large paint manufacturer,” he says.

The 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, meanwhile, was awarded to a process of chemical synthesis that cut down on time, byproducts and complicated industrial machinery by exploiting the tendency of some molecules to swap their components with others under the right circumstances.

Still, Australia’s Green Chemistry Challenge, an initiative of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, had no applicants in 2011 or 2012 (although Hearns’ contribution as an educator was awarded in 2010). That could be because, as an institute staff member points out, “It’s a very difficult award to get,” partly because applicants must demonstrate they have reached a “significant milestone, including [the process] being patented”.

Or could it point to something bigger? In a keynote speech in Canada, Warner pointed out a hurdle he sees before chemistry can play the role he believes it can. “What are we saying to kids when we say: ‘If you want to save the world, you need to fight chemistry’? We should be saying: ‘If you want to save the world, become a chemist’.”