Innovating Everyday Chemicals with Green Chemistry: More Sustainable Lubricants, Solvents, and Fertilizers

Chemists across the industry & academia are driving innovation by integrating green chemistry & engineering principles into the design, manufacturing, & processes of chemicals. Join three recipients of the 2024 Green Chemistry Challenge Awards—a collaboration between the U.S. EPA and the ACS Green Chemistry Institute—as they share impactful scientific achievements.

The $60 billion lubricant market spans applications from industrial machinery to everyday vehicles. Lubricant base oils, traditionally derived from petroleum, comprise 75-90% of these formulations. Dionisios Vlachos of the University of Delaware will discuss new synthetic methods to produce lubricant base oils using biobased feedstocks, such as plants or food waste, that provide comparable or better performance to existing technologies. Through heterogeneous catalysis, the new process also reduces the use of hazardous reagents, including corrosive acids, compared to existing bio-based lubricant production.

Ethanol is increasingly recognized as a promising feedstock for sustainable chemistry that significantly reduce the reliance on fossil fuels and its use in chemical production helps lower greenhouse gas emissions. Amit Hasabnis of the Viridis Chemical Company will discuss a greener synthetic method and more circular process design for ethyl acetate from corn bioethanol, instead of using chemicals acquired from processing coal or natural gas.

Traditional phosphate fertilizer production poses significant environmental challenges, including acid-based rock processing, hazardous gypsum waste with heavy metals and radioactivity, and fluorine emissions. Ed Gannon of PhoSul will introduce a new fertilizer consisting of spherical granules of phosphate rock combined with other materials that improve phosphate availability for plants. The additional materials allow the tricalcium phosphate in the phosphate rock, which is not available to plants, to be converted into available forms in the soil.