Early Industrial Roots of Green Chemistry International “Pollution Prevention” Efforts During the 1970s and 1980s* by Mark A. Murphy
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any literature articles, conventional histories, and narratives about the origins of “Green Chemistry” describe it as being a result of concepts and actions at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and/or research in Academia during the 1990s and later. But many examples of increasingly environmentally friendly real-world chemical processes were invented, developed, and commercialized in the oil refining, commodity chemical, and consumer product industries in many countries decades before the 1990s. The earliest efforts evolved and accelerated into many environmentally-oriented and commercialized industrial examples of “Pollution Prevention” during the 1970s and 1980s. The “Green Chemistry” terminology and “Principles” adopted by the EPA and Academia in the 1990s evolved from and re-named the mostly industrial “Pollution Prevention” approaches and inventions.
Innovations in Green Chemistry were made in the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals as early as 1984. *
In 1984, this author conceived one of the earliest and currently well-known industrial examples of Green Chemistry, the BHC Ibuprofen Process, commercialized in 1992. That invention won a Kirkpatrick Award from Chemical Engineering magazine in 1993, and one of the first US Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards. This author recently argued in three published historical / philosophical articles [1-3] that the complex technical and/or human/cultural evolutionary origins of Green Chemistry began long before the 1990s, and identified many examples from chemically related industries that traced their origins to shortly after World War II. Many references that support and document these assertions can be found in this author’s original articles. This author’s 2018 article [2] recounted, from an inventor’s perspective, the genuine story of the conception, development, and commercialization of the BHC Ibuprofen process, a story that had been badly mis-told many times in the academic literature and industry press. That article told the BHC Ibuprofen story in a broad context of many prior and relevant technical developments and inventions, as well as many scientific / economic / engineering, historical, cultural and economic/business influences, all of which contributed to the invention, development, and commercialization of the BHC Ibuprofen process. Those predecessors included the long prior commercialization of increasingly environmentally friendly and atom economical processes for making commodity organic chemicals such as methanol, ethanol, formaldehyde, acetic acid, and many higher organic commodity aldehydes, alcohols, and carboxylic acids, via the use of catalytic methods and reactions. The article also documented the influence of the “Quality” principles and methods of W. Edwards Deming that were widely taught in industry in the 1980s, and Deming’s emphasis on waste reduction in all the multi-disciplinary aspects of a real-world commercial product or process. This author’s most recent article [1], published in September 2020 in Substantia, applies a yet broader historical perspective to produce a major re-write of the early history of Green Chemistry. The evolutionary pathway that led toward Green Chemistry had its origins in the oil refining industry boom that began at
This article was solicited as a result of a joint project between Chemistry International and Substantia. Substantia is an open access peer-reviewed international journal dedicated to traditional perspectives as well as innovative and synergetic implications in all fields of Chemistry, from current research to historical studies. It is meant to be a crucible for discussions on science, on making science and its outcomes. This joint project is simply to seed interest across communities and bring to CI readers contents of historical relevance; reader are encouraged to review full articles in Substantia. https://fupress.com/substantia
Chemistry International
January-March 2021
21
