20 January 2025 – What is green chemistry, and how has systems thinking influenced your work in this field?
If you look at the UN Sustainable Development Goals, each involves some material thing that must be eliminated, replaced or invented. Because our society has a very poor relationship to chemistry, we feel all the solutions must come from policy or economics and that limits our future.
Sadly, there are very few people in the world who truly understand chemistry. There are thousands and thousands of universities in the world that train chemists. The shocking reality is that no university, or until a few years ago, there were none, that teach you how to look at a material you’re about to invent and predict whether it might be toxic to humans or whether it might hurt the environment. It’s 100% absent from our curriculum. If you’re working with a known compound, there is a tiny bit of training about toxicity, environmental impact etc., but most chemists have no training on how to make sustainable materials or the impact of their compounds. Otherwise, why would a chemist make a material that hurts humans or hurts the environment?
There are two processes to make a product that people use. There is the actual fundamental material, the building block, and then there is how we formulate it to make a product. The materials our society is based on today are not sustainable. We can’t make our unsustainable materials exist in a circular economy because they are toxic, we need fundamental new molecules.
You must know chemistry to make safe new materials. My education taught me how to make the colour red, how to make it stick to a fabric, not fade etc. but not how to make it biodegradable or non-toxic. The dream, the vision of green chemistry is that a generation from now, every chemist will have these skills. If we really want systemic change, we must make efforts to change the way we teach chemistry. That’s what green chemistry is. It’s the body of knowledge that when a chemist learns chemistry, it allows them to create truly sustainable materials.
In our systems approach at The Club of Rome, we must make sure we are including the creation of new materials, because we cannot have a sustainable future with the materials we’re working with today. If we are to succeed there are some compounds that must be replaced. Sustainable materials are needed, we can’t just do or use less. This will solve the existing issues of resources, especially if we look at people with less access to existing sustainable goods. And it can be done. I really do believe it can.
In what ways can The Club of Rome help drive innovation?
I would love to see The Club of Rome get a little bit more involved with where materials come from and how they are created and not just how do we manage them. If we have excellent performance, excellent cost, and it’s sustainable, everyone will use a sustainable material. Once the technology is invented, everyone wants it, but no one wants to invest in the creation of that technology. Neither academia nor investors are currently significantly involved in inventing sustainable materials at a local level. Nobody is looking at these small, incremental inventions that are critical for local economies. It would be great if The Club of Rome could help answer the question, how do we catalyse not the adoption, but the invention of these technologies? That is the unmet need, in my opinion. To tell a country which is already making do with less resources to do less is not appropriate, supporting invention of more sustainable materials everywhere is the key.
What has been the greatest inspiration from nature for your work?
Everything I do has some inspiration from nature, whether it’s bio inspiration, bio mimicry or something like that. But I do feel that there’s a certain obviousness about looking at how a tree absorbs carbon dioxide to create materials or how nature makes a barrier material that we can create packaging from. That is all important, I love that and all my inventions embrace that.
However, if we truly admire nature and biology as I do, the one thing that we should recognise is that there are no committees in nature.
The reason that nature is so gorgeous and beautiful and full of diversity is because there are no committees that have appointed themselves as the arbiter of what should and shouldn’t happen.
To truly embrace nature, we must recognise that the entropy of experimentation does not need critical oversight. We need to have that creativity. What has happened over recent decades is if I want funding to do something, I must convince people that it’ll absolutely work. There is zero risk. The only projects being funded are incremental inventions which are not innovative. Of course, we’re not going to do crazy things in the lab, but if I had a magic wand, I would create a substantial percentage of funding in science to be through a lottery without reviewing it for feasibility. It’s a very complicated process to become capable of inventing materials, and it really does take years of training to do that. We don’t need committees without the skills and experience required to deny innovation.
What is the most important advice you can offer to create solutions compatible with natural ecosystems?
For people who want to be chemists or material scientists, right now there aren’t enough universities teaching green chemistry, so they need to learn the traditional skills of chemistry and material science, and then from their own principles, refuse to not do green chemistry.
If they apply for a job and that job is asking them to do things that are not sustainable, they need to ask themselves if it is worth it to use the skills and learning they have to make the world a less healthy place. My advice is really think about it, because it’s one thing if you have a job that works with unsustainable materials, that’s a problem. But if your job is to create unsustainable materials, why would you do that? If our best and brightest people go to support the unsustainable companies, how do we ever fix this problem?
What does a sustainable society look like to you?
This is utopia. Imagine a world where people are not greedy, people are not selfish, their egos are in control and they use materials that they need and they have a sense of abundance that if they want a little bit more of something to make them feel good, that those materials are available at an appropriate economic point and they are circular and sustainable.
The quantity of material consumed doesn’t have an impact on the ultimate sustainability because materials have been invented to tolerate that. This is also important because people need work to sustain themselves and have a meaningful life. I feel in my perfect dream world, we invent a set of materials and people can have good jobs making things. People can buy things and use things without guilt because the materials are intrinsically sustainable. And if we go back to nature, there is no material in nature that isn’t sustainable. Nature does not abide by austerity but by abundance. Every entity does as much as it needs. It’s not thinking, “How do I do less?” But right now, our materials economy requires that if we don’t invent anything new, we do have to curtail the use of materials.
We are going to definitely still need economic and policy solutions, but the more molecular material solutions we have, the better it’s going to be for everybody because then we’re not forcing people to behave against their natural inclinations. That’s my dream – which could take 50-60 years. It’s going to take a generation to change academia so that the next generation of chemists have these skills. And then one by one they’re going to replace different technologies and become sustainable. We need patience to do this. And we’re going to need policy and economic models to help us get there. But if our policy and economic models close down the opportunity to create these materials, there’s going to be human suffering in other ways.