2010 Michigan Green Chemistry Governor's Award

The Great Lakes Green Chemistry Network, an organization whose mission is to promote the practice of Green Chemistry in the binational Great Lakes basin, has won the 2010 Michigan Green Chemistry Governor's Award for outstanding work by a public sector organization to advance green chemistry. "Green Chemistry is an innovative approach to how chemicals are designed and created that uses twelve principles to guide the elimination and reduction of hazard. Green Chemistry is all about finding safer alternatives to toxic chemicals in an effort to protect human health and the environment," said Lin Kaatz Chary, project director of the Network. "We believe it has tremendous potential for addressing the many environmental challenges in the Great Lakes basin."

Here are the 12 guiding principles of Green Chemistry:

The Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry

1. Prevention - It is better to prevent waste than to treat or clean up waste after it has been created.
2. Atom Economy - Synthetic methods should be designed to maximize the incorporation of all materials used in the process into the final product.
3. Less Hazardous Chemical Syntheses - Wherever practicable, synthetic methods should be designed to use and generate substances that possess little or no toxicity to human health and the environment.
4. Designing Safer Chemicals - Chemical products should be designed to effect their desired function while minimizing their toxicity.
5. Safer Solvents and Auxiliaries - The use of auxiliary substances (e.g., solvents, separation agents, etc.) should be made unnecessary wherever possible and innocuous when used.
6. Design for Energy Efficiency - Energy requirements of chemical processes should be recognized for their environmental and economic impacts and should be minimized. If possible, synthetic methods should be conducted at ambient temperature and pressure.
7. Use of Renewable Feedstocks - A raw material or feedstock should be renewable rather than depleting whenever technically and economically practicable.
8. Reduce Derivatives - Unnecessary derivatization (use of blocking groups, protection/ deprotection, temporary modification of physical/chemical processes) should be minimized or avoided if possible, because such steps require additional reagents and can generate waste.
9. Catalysis - Catalytic reagents (as selective as possible) are superior to stoichiometric reagents.
10. Design for Degradation - Chemical products should be designed so that at the end of their function they break down into innocuous degradation products and do not persist in the environment.
11. Real-time analysis for Pollution Prevention - Analytical methodologies need to be further developed to allow for real-time, in-process monitoring and control prior to the formation of hazardous substances.
12. Inherently Safer Chemistry for Accident Prevention - Substances and the form of a substance used in a chemical process should be chosen to minimize the potential for chemical accidents, including releases, explosions, and fires.

This all sounds like a common sense approach to 'greening up' our industries.

Check out their website -- including their many recorded seminars you can stream -- at:
www.glgc.org