Miller, Joseph A. GREEN CHEMISTRY: WHAT'S POSSIBLE? A LOT!
DuPont CR&D, Experimental Station E 328/411, P.O. Box 80328, Wilmington, DE 19880-0328 (jalbertmiller@msn.com)
DuPont has made the commitment to "drive toward zero waste generation at the source...and develop new products and processes that have increasing margins of safety for both human health and the environment." How definitions of what is safe for human health and the environment have changed, challenging our skills as chemists. While we will not eliminate elements from the periodic table, and while we will continue to use HCN, chlorine, and other potentially hazardous reactants, we will push the chemical sciences toward these ever more stringent requirements and begin to enlist the biological sciences. To find more environmentally benign processes and products, we will use the "Inherently Safer Process Checklist" as our guide looking at ways to minimize, substitute or eliminate, modify or simplify conditions for, potentially hazardous materials. We will give examples of research illustrating points on the checklist and start the search for other examples to be given at Boulder in the coming days.