Anastas gets Heinz environmental prize
Paul Anastas will receive the Heinz Family Foundation prize next week for his work promoting the principles of green chemistry.
Paul Anastas takes green chemistry personally, to the point that he and his wife, Julie Zimmerman, purchased CO2 credits to make up for the emissions created by their October wedding.
As head of the Green Chemistry Institute at the American Chemical Society, Anastas instituted the same practice for the group’s annual conference. “Why give those cheap plastic trinkets,” he asks, “when the same money could go to ensuring that attendees’ carbon emissions from their travel to the meeting were offset?”
Anastas’s persistence in moving forward that concept of sustainability and prevention in chemistry has been rewarded by the Heinz Family Foundation, which honors him this month as the “Father of Green Chemistry” with a $250,000 prize. When asked what he will do with the prize money, Anastas replies half-jokingly, “All I do now with my money is promote green chemistry anyway.”
Anastas coauthored the 12 principles of green chemistry in what has been called the seminal book in the field, Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice, and he was the guest editor for a special issue of ES&T on the principles of green engineering (December 1, 2003). He gives credit to his mentor at the U.S. EPA, the late Roger Garrett, and to the late Joe Breen, the first director of the Green Chemistry Institute, for inspiring him in his work.
Anastas says he has been thrilled to see the pharmaceutical industry embrace the principles of sustainability and low impact this year in its Green Chemistry Institute Pharmaceutical Roundtable, among other successes he has overseen in his tenure at the institute since 2004. In January, Anastas will move on to a faculty position at Yale University, where he will lead the newly established Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering. But the shift in venue—and the Heinz Award—will not lead to any changes in his philosophy, he says: “You can take me out of the Green Chemistry Institute, but you can’t take green chemistry out of me.”
