Soybean coolant, eco-friendlier house paint, vegan leather win the honors
 |
| Vegan leathers are replacing some animal-based ones. An award-winning green chemist is working with shoe companies to use his faux leather that avoids tanning processes |
A coolant made from soybean oil and a more
eco-friendly white paint are two winners of the 2013 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency honored
five innovative technologies that made important breakthroughs in becoming
safer, cleaner and more sustainable.
Over recent decades, industries have relied on
many compounds and manufacturing techniques that are toxic, consume resources,
or threaten the environment. The goal of green chemistry is to develop new
technologies that are not only more environmentally friendly, but commercially
viable.
The awards recognize companies and technologies
“not just because they have great potential, but because they have shown they
can achieve that potential,” said Jim Jones, EPA Assistant Administrator for
Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.
“What really strikes me about this year’s
winners is how successful some of them have already been in the marketplace,”
he said.
Martin Mulvihill, executive director of the
University of California's Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry, said the
winners “represent concrete improvements in reducing the environmental impacts
of the chemicals industry.”
One of the five awards went to Cargill, Inc.,
for its soybean-oil based substitute for petroleum-based
oils used as coolants in electrical transformers.
“We’ve done cradle-to-grave analysis showing
that this product is carbon neutral, non-toxic and non-hazardous,” said Dave
Roesser, Cargill's general manager of dielectric fluids.
More than 500,000 transformers in the U.S.
– roughly 10 percent of the market – currently use the
technology, which has been sold commercially since 1998, he said.
Roesser said the technology, called Envirotemp
FR3, is less flammable than mineral oils and can extend the operational life of
the insulation.
Coolants are important to ensure that large,
high-voltage electrical equipment doesn’t overheat. Some of these compounds can
persist in the environment or have toxic effects. Petroleum-based mineral oils
replaced polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which were used in transformers
until they were banned in the late 1970s.
Dow Chemical Co., of Midland, Mich., was awarded
for a new technology that reduces the amount of energy
and water used to make white pigments for paint, and cuts its emissions of air
pollutants and greenhouse gases.
“We’ve improved paint performance properties
such as stain resistance and durability while using less titanium dioxide,”
wrote Dow Vice President Neil Hawkins in an email.
Titanium dioxide is usually added to most paint
as a white pigment to hide the color of a painted material. But the compound is
costly and energy-intensive. A new Dow polymer improves how the pigment is
dispersed so less of it is necessary in paint. In exterior house paint, the new
technique reduces the paint's carbon footprint by more than 22 percent, its
water consumption by 30 percent and its air pollutants by 24 percent, company
officials said, based on a third-party assessment.
In the academic category, Richard Wool, chemical
engineering professor at the University of Delaware, won for using chicken feathers, vegetable
oils, flax and other bio-based, renewable feedstocks to make composite
materials.These materials can replace plastics and other petroleum-based
products and be used for a variety of purposes, such as adhesives, foams and
computer circuit boards.
One of Wool's inventions is a breathable vegan
leather that avoids traditional tanning processes. His company, Eco-Leather, is working with athletic shoe
companies to market it. Since 1992, he has received five patents, and a
chemical company has produced his resins for a worldwide market.
An award also went to Life Technologies Corp, a
biomedical company in Austin, Texas, for pioneering a less-wasteful way to manufacture chemicals
used in genetic testing.
Those chemicals used in genetics are important
for food safety, basic research, disease identification and other uses. But
manufacturing them usually produces a lot of wastes because of high solvent
use.
The company’s new technique reduces solvent use by 95 percent, and
eliminates 1.5 million pounds of hazardous waste each year from its manufacturing
plant.
In addition, the company says its process of
producing the chemicals is now fairly simple, describing it as “three-step,
one-pot.”
Faraday Technology, Inc., of Clayton, Ohio, was
recognized in the small business category for a less-toxic form of chrome plating – the kind
used in manufacture of high-performance parts such as airplane components. Its
technique replaces hexavalent chromium, a highly potent carcinogen, with
trivalent chromium, which is less toxic and non-carcinogenic. It is considered
a breakthrough because it provides the performance required for specialized
military and industrial parts, according to the EPA’s report.
Mulvihill said these awards don’t guarantee a
perfect process or perfect chemical but they do show that industry is heading
in the right direction.
Over the past 18 years, the EPA has received
1,500 entries and awarded 93 technologies. Every year, innovations from
previous award winners eliminate enough hazardous chemicals to fill a train of
railroad tank cars 47 miles long and save 27 billion gallons of water,
according to the EPA.
A panel of technical experts convened by the American Chemical Society, the largest scientific
society in the country with more than 163,000 members, selected the 2013
winners.
The technologies are evaluated for their
environmental impacts over their entire life cycle – from the start of
production to the disposal of wastes.
Being a successful green chemist means changing
the usual mindset, said Terry Collins, director for the Institute for Green
Science at Carnegie Mellon University and past Presidential Green Chemistry
award winner.
“It requires a basic change in attitude from
thinking not only about how to make a high performance product to understanding
what it means not to injure life with chemical products. It’s enormously
interdisciplinary,” he said.