Green Chemistry Blog

Green Chemistry Advisory Board member Joan Brennecke, the Keating-Crawford Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, USA, has been elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering.  This honour has been awarded “for innovation in the use of ionic liquids and supercritical fluids for environmentally benign chemical processing.” 

Election to the National Academy of Engineering is one of the highest professional distinctions that can be awarded to an engineer.  An Academy membership honours those who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice or education.

Green Chemistry would like to extend our warmest congratulations to Professor Brennecke on this achievement.

On Thursday the 27th September, Professor James Clark from the University of York, UK, gave a public lecture at The Chemistry Centre in London on “From Waste to Wealth using Green Chemistry“.

The world today faces the fundamental issues of increasing waste but decreasing resources as it tries to cope with the ever increasing consumption of a growing population.  Many of the raw resources and elements needed for the manufacture of important products used everyday are now running out.  For example, in our search for ‘carbon-free’ products we have then created additional problems by significantly depleting the world’s resource of other elements, such as germanium.  We generate so much waste, but what do we do with it?  How can we deal with our waste more efficiently?

The only way these problems can be met and dealt with is through a fundamentally different approach to the way we consume resources.  Professor Clark’s lecture shows how by considering our waste as an opportunity rather than a problem, we can fully move towards a truly sustainable resource consumption model and give our children some hope for the future.

The event, sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline, was strongly attended by an audience of 100 people from a broad range of different backgrounds.  The event generated lots of questions and some lively debates which continued long after the lecture had ended. 

Missed the lecture?  You can watch Professor Clark’s lecture in full on The Reaction website!

Professor Clark is the founding Editor of Green Chemistry and is also one of the Editors of the RSC Green Chemistry Book Series – find out more here.

You may also be interested in a few of Professor Clark’s recent Green Chemistry articles – free to access until the 9th November 2012:

Preparation and characterisation of bioplastics made from cottonseed protein, H.-B. Yue, Y.-D. Cui, P. S. Shuttleworth and James H. Clark, Green Chem., 2012, 14, 2009-2016

Thermosetting resin based on epoxidised linseed oil and bio-derived crosslinker, Nontipa Supanchaiyamat, Peter S. Shuttleworth, Andrew J. Hunt, James H. Clark and Avtar S. Matharu, Green Chem., 2012, 14, 1759-1765

A quantitative comparison between conventional and bio-derived solvents from citrus waste in esterification and amidation kinetic studies, James H. Clark, Duncan J. Macquarrie and James Sherwood, Green Chem., 2012, 14, 90-93

Switchable adhesives for carpet tiles: a major breakthrough in sustainable flooring, Peter S. Shuttleworth, James H. Clark, Robert Mantle and Nigel Stansfield, Green Chem., 2010, 12, 798-803

Professor Martyn Poliakoff from the University of Nottingham and Chair of the Green Chemistry Editorial Board, has been awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Nyholm Prize for Education and has been elected as a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The Nyholm Prize for Education, in honour of Sir Ronald Hyholm, has been awarded to Professor Poliakoff for his work in bringing a whole new audience to chemistry through the Periodic Table of Videos.  Professor Poliakoff said:

“I was really happy to be awarded the Nyholm Prize which I regard as a prize for the whole of the Periodic Table of Videos team. It is particularly gratifying as Sir Ronald Nyholm, in whose honour this prize is named, was a hugely important figure in both chemical research and chemical education.”

Professor Poliakoff will present a talk entitled ‘From Test Tube to YouTube’ at the RSC Education Division Nyholm Symposium at the University of Nottingham on Wednesday the 8th February. 

Professor Poliakoff has also been elected as a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an honour which is particularly special due to his own strong links with the country. 

Green Chemistry would like to extend our warmest congratulations to Professor Poliakoff.

Professor Martyn Poliakoff

The RSC Prize Winners 2011 have recently been announced and Green Chemistry Board Members Martyn Poliakoff and James Clark have both been honoured.  The RSC Prizes have been designed to be of the broadest relevance to the chemical sciences community as a whole, rewarding those whose careers are defined by exceptional work, excellence and dedication. 

Professor Martyn Poliakoff from Nottingham University is Chair of the Green Chemistry Editorial Board.  He was recently nominated to be the next Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society. Professor Poliakoff has been awarded the Nyholm Prize for Education which is for outstanding accomplishment in education relating to the chemical sciences.  He was chosen due to his enthusiastic leadership in taking chemistry to the widest possible audience, using not only traditional channels but also the power of YouTube.

Professor James Clark

Professor James Clark was the founding Editor of Green Chemistry and is still involved with the journal on our Advisory Board.  He has been awarded the Environment Prize which is for outstanding contributions to the chemical sciences in the area of environment, sustainability and energy (sponsored by Proctor & Gamble).  Professor Clark was chosen for his fundamental and applied research contributions to the areas of green chemistry, clean technology and sustainability and for educational, publishing and public awareness contributions in the green chemistry area.

We would like to congratulate Professor Poliakoff and Professor Clark.

“Not all ionic liquids are green!” is what we often hear at Green Chemistry conferences. Indeed there have been many debates about ionic liquid toxicity and more importantly how we determine if an ionic liquid is “green”. However, we increasingly receive a number of articles merely reporting the properties of an ionic liquid or its toxicity with no insight on its impact on green processes.

In the new editorial by Tom Welton, he clarifies the Journal’s policy on the publication of ionic liquid toxicity studies. While it is, of course, a very important area of research for the ionic liquid community, the new guidelines in the editorial state that articles purely on ionic liquid toxicity will no longer fall within the scope of Green Chemistry. However,  if an article on ionic liquid toxicity demonstrates that the design of the ionic liquid improves a green process or product then that article is within the redefined scope of the Journal. In the same way that studies on the physical properties of ionic liquids are useful to practitioners of Green Chemistry, the actual work in itself is not “green chemistry” – the same applies to ionic liquid toxicity studies.

Click here to read the full editorial by Tom Welton.

Whether it is an ionic liquid or not, choosing the right solvent is very important when attempting to make a chemical process “greener”. Read the latest perspective by Phil Jessop on searching for green solvents.

You may also be interested in reading our 2009 themed issue on “Green solvents – Progress in science and application” published in Green Chemistry.