1960s
Rachel Carson wrote the mainstream scientific book Silent Spring in 1962. It outlined the devastation that certain chemicals had on local ecosystems. The book served as a wake-up call for the public and scientists alike and inspired the modern environmental movement.
In 1969, Congress recognized the importance of the issue and passed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The law's goal was to "create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony," and called for a Presidential Council on Environmental Quality.
1970s
In 1970, President Richard Nixon established the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a federal regulatory agency devoted solely to protecting human health and the environment. The EPA's first major decision was to ban the use of DDT and other chemical pesticides.
Congress passed a series of regulatory laws to stem the environmental impact of pollution, such as the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974.
In the late 1970s, the discovery and publicity surrounding Love Canal in Niagara Falls, NY scandalized the chemical industry. At this and other locations, thousands of barrels filled with chemical waste – which had been buried by chemical companies over the previous decades – rusted through, leaking toxic chemicals into the soil and contaminating groundwater.
1980s
Until the 1980s, the chemical industry and the EPA were focused mainly on pollution clean-up and obvious toxins, but a major paradigm shift began to occur among chemists. Scientists who came of age during the decades of growing environmental awareness began to research avenues for preventing pollution in the first place. Leaders in the industry and government began international conversations addressing the problems and looking for preventative solutions.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an international body of over 30 industrialized countries, held meetings through the 1980s addressing environmental concerns. They made a series of international recommendations which focused on a co-operative change in existing chemical processes and pollution prevention.
The Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics was established within the EPA in 1988 to facilitate these environmental goals.
1990s
This decade marked accelerated acceptance of pollution prevention and the establishment of green chemistry as a legitimate scientific field.
The Pollution Prevention Act of 1990 marked a regulatory policy change from pollution control to pollution prevention as the most effective strategy for these environmental issues.
The Chemistry Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) at the time, Kenneth G. Hancock, publicly advocated this approach as an economically viable strategy. Chemists across the globe agreed that this could reverse the industrial tendency toward environmental deterioration.
In the early 1990s, the European Community's Chemistry Council published papers on the subject, including the influential work, "Chemistry for a Clean World." The first symposium based on these ideas, "Benign by Design: Alternative Synthetic Design for Pollution Prevention," was held in 1994 in Chicago and sponsored by the Division of Environmental Chemistry of the American Chemical Society.
Staff of the EPA Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxins coined the phrase "Green Chemistry" and sowed the seeds of productive collaboration between government, industry, and academia. Chemists Paul Anastas and John C. Warner outlined twelve principles to guide the development of environmentally friendly chemical processes. During this time, Paul Anastas led the EPA Green Chemistry Program which focused on research and education. Alongside colleagues at the EPA, he mobilized policymakers and made the case that green chemistry innovations should be recognized and celebrated.
In 1995, the EPA received support from President Bill Clinton to establish an annual awards program, the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards (GCCAs), to recognize and promote innovative chemical technologies that prevent pollution and have broad applicability in the industry.
Two years later, in 1997, the University of Massachusetts at Boston established the field's first Green Chemistry Ph.D. program.
In that same year, following significant multi-stakeholder planning across industry, government, and academia, Dr. Joe Breen, a retired 20-year staff member of the EPA, and Dr. Dennis Hjeresen, a researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, co-founded the Green Chemistry Institute (GCI) as an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting and advancing green chemistry. Paul Anastas chaired a committee that consisted of Joe Desimone (at the time a professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina), Bill Tumas (then a project leader at DuPont), Sid Chao (Hughes Environmental), and Dennis Hjeresen. When the GCI was launched, Joe Breen became the Institute’s first director.
The Green Chemistry and Engineering (GC&E) Conference was also launched in 1997 to highlight the GCCA winners and convene the community. Paul Anastas partnered with Joseph Breen, the Chair of the ACS Committee on Environmental Improvement, to seek partnerships for a dedicated ACS conference on green chemistry. The conference, funded by the EPA, was held at the National Academies headquarters in Washington, DC. With Paul Anastas as the Chair, it was co-organized by a committee of colleagues from the EPA, National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Department of Energy (DOE), and the ACS (specifically, Ray Garrant and Sylvia Ware). The meeting attracted about 150 participants. As the conference grew, the venue changed to larger hotels in the DC area, eventually outgrowing venues in the central part of DC entirely.
Paul Anastas and John C. Warner co-authored the groundbreaking book, Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice in 1998. The 12 Principles of Green Chemistry outlined within this work declared a philosophy that motivated academic and industrial scientists at the time and continues to guide the green chemistry movement.
Another key event took place in 1999. The Green Chemistry Institute and the University of Massachusetts, Boston, collaborated to organize the first education summit on green chemistry. The summit led to the publication of a compendium of laboratory experiences that illustrated the principles of green chemistry in undergraduate labs.
2000s
When Joseph Breen passed away in 2000, the EPA and ACS agreed to merge the GCI under the ACS umbrella. In 2001, the GCI became part of the American Chemical Society – the world's largest professional scientific society and membership organization for chemists – signaling that green chemistry was gaining prominence and becoming an essential part of chemistry's toolkit. The ACS Board Chair at the time, Nina McClelland, was instrumental in the arrangement, and Dennis Hjesen was appointed the new Director of the ACS GCI.
As more researchers in both industry and academia embraced the noble yet commonsense goal behind the concept of green chemistry, more fundamental research became rooted in green chemistry principles. Early adoption among synthetic chemists – particularly catalysis chemists – provided excellent examples of how compatible the principles are with smarter, more elegant, and more efficient chemistry.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was won for research in areas of chemistry that were largely seen as being green chemistry in both 2001 (Knowles, Noyori, Sharpless) and 2005 (Chauvin, Grubbs, Schrock). These Nobel Prizes helped solidify the importance of research in green chemistry and helped establish the importance of green chemistry in a discipline rooted in traditional practice.
In 2005, the ACS GCI established an industrial roundtable for the pharmaceutical industry, to catalyze and enable green and engineering into chemical businesses. Since then, additional collaborative industry groups have been organized by the ACS GCI, including the Oilfield Chemistry Roundtable and the Natural Polymers Consortium.
Green chemistry groups, journals, and conferences have since been launched worldwide. Examples include:
- The ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering journal
- The Royal Society of Chemistry's (UK) journal Green Chemistry
- The Green and Sustainable Chemistry Network in Japan (co-organizers of the Asian-Oceania Conference on Green and Sustainable Chemistry)
- The ARC Training Center for Green Chemistry in Manufacturing at Monash University in Australia
- The Green Chemistry Centre of Excellence at the University of York, United Kingdom
- The Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale University
- The Annual International Symposium on Green Chemistry (ISGC)
- And many others
Links to more organizations, schools, and conferences are found throughout the ACS GCI website.
Educational and research curricula became increasingly available to schools, kindergarten through post-graduate.
Many successful entrepreneurial companies, whose products are based on the application of green chemistry and engineering have been established, selling everything from 'green' glue to sustainable water processing solutions.
Moreover, in the last three decades, green chemistry has fostered unprecedented collaborations among academia, industry, and policymakers, leading to the development of regulations and initiatives promoting safer and more sustainable chemical practices.
Today and the Future
After all of the research advancements in green chemistry and engineering, mainstream chemical businesses have not yet fully embraced the technology. Today, nearly 90% of feedstocks used to make chemicals are still derived from fossil sources.
Green chemists and engineers are increasingly taking their research and innovations out of the lab and into the board room through the creation of viable industrial products embraced by today’s industry leaders. With green chemistry, scientists globally are tackling today's biggest sustainability challenges, working to harmonize human well-being with the health of our planet.
The ACS Green Chemistry Institute® continues to be a clearinghouse of information, connection, and research sharing through The Nexus Newsletter and Nexus Blog, the annual GC&E Conference, industrial roundtables, and a growing number of educational and research programs.
