Green chemistry gets the prize
The winners advance sustainability with efficient biobased materials and processes.
A trip to the seashore inspired one of this year’s winners of the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge. Kaichang Li, a wood chemist at Oregon State University, recalled seeing the strong tendrils of a mussel gripping seashore rocks and wood flotsam. His curiosity piqued, Li later made a wood adhesive that is based on the same proteins that mussels use to create their anchoring fibers. That biobased glue is one of the five winners honored at the 11th Annual Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference in June in Washington, D.C.
After determining how mussels create the protein chitosan, Li and his colleagues manufactured a similar polymer by creating a reaction that would add the proper amino acids to soy flour, which lacks the proteins that mussels make. The result was an adhesive that cross-linked with wood fibers in a “gigantic network, like putting a key in a lock and turning it,” Li said in his presentation at the June meeting.
Li’s team’s work, begun in earnest in 2000, has now borne enough fruit to garner the interest of two wood-and-paper products companies, Columbia Forest Products and Hercules, Inc. The formaldehyde-free adhesive is sold as part of plywood and particleboard products and replaced more than 47 million pounds of more traditional formaldehyde-based wood glues in 2006 at comparable costs. The mussel-bound woods have lower volatile organic compound emissions than typical compressed woods and meet the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards (better known as LEED). The products also have similar strength characteristics—even after multiple “drownings” to test the dissolvability of the glue.
From EPA’S Website:
- Greener Synthetic Pathways Award
Development and Commercial Application of Environmentally Friendly Adhesives for Wood Composites (summary) - Greener Reaction Conditions Award
Direct Synthesis of Hydrogen Peroxide by Selective Nanocatalyst Technology (summary) - Designing Greener Chemicals Award
BiOH Polyols (summary) - Small Business Award
Environmentally Benign Medical Sterilization Using Supercritical Carbon Dioxide (summary) - Academic Award
Hydrogen-Mediated Carbon–Carbon Bond Formation (summary)
The green chemistry awards, established and sponsored by chemical companies and organizations (including the American Chemical Society, publisher of ES&T) in partnership with the U.S. EPA, are an opportunity to highlight research from academia and industry that focuses on more efficient techniques using less water or feedstocks, among other criteria that follow the 12 principles of green chemistry, to create better products. This year’s other awardees included Cargill’s BiOH Polyols, a vegetable-oil-based compound that is used as a major component of polyurethane foams. NovaSterilis, Inc., a small company based in Ithaca, N.Y., found a way to use supercritical CO2 to sterilize medical materials, including skin grafts and vaccines, without the usual methods that require ethylene oxide or γ radiation.
In the pursuit of “greener” reactions, Headwaters Technology Innovation developed a synthesis method for hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) that uses a 4-nanometer palladium–platinum catalyst. The process makes H2O2 directly from hydrogen and oxygen, with no need for vacuum purification and none of the quinine byproducts associated with more widely used methods.
Michael J. Krische at the University of Texas Austin and colleagues won for developing a new class of basic, widely used hydrogenation reactions that use metals to catalyze more efficient, cleaner reactions. The new hydrogenation process forms carbon–carbon bonds (instead of carbon–hydrogen bonds) to make pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and other products used every day.
