the allegheny front

Creating a New Chemistry

Reid R. Frazier

Air date: 04/18/2007

OPEN: Look around the room and chances are you'll find something made with the help of a chemist. It's in the dye of your clothes, the circuitry in your speakers, the paint on your walls. Problem is, these chemicals that help can also hurt by causing pollution which affects the environment and human health. The Allegheny Front's Reid Frazier dusted off his high school chemistry book and looked for some scientists who are trying to change all that. You might be surprised who he found leading the charge for this green way of thinking about chemistry.

FRAZIER: Listen closely and you might hear the sound of a cleaner environment.

SOUND: Machine beeps and whirs. Robotic arm tracks.

FRAZIER: That's a gas chromatograph. It's used by chemists around the world to analyze chemical compounds. It's a white box that looks a lot like a safe. A tray full of vials sitting on top. A robotic arm hovers over the vials, then injects them with a syringe full of clear liquid. The machine may be typical for a chemistry lab. But what's inside these vials isn't so common.

BEACH: We try and work with as close to the real pollution as we can. We actually have the paper mill ship the stuff to us.

FRAZIER: Evan Beach is a graduate student in chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He works at the school's Institute for Green Oxidation Chemistry, or Green Ox. The chemists and grad students at Green Ox are looking for ways to neutralize harmful pollution from paper mills and other sources. They use a catalyst called TAML. Colin Horwitz, a Carnegie Mellon professor and Green Ox researcher, sketches out how it works on a whiteboard in his office.

HORWITZ: We put the TAML and hydrogen peroxide together in water, what happens is the TAML and hydrogen peroxide react together really fast and they start attacking this phenol molecule.

FRAZIER: Chemists call the catalyst "liquid fire" because it eats chains of pollutants that normally take decades to decompose. It also feasts on biological agents like anthrax, pharmaceuticals, and endocrine disruptors. These are molecules found in common plastics and pesticides that disrupt the body's hormonal system. Carnegie Mellon professor Terry Collins started designing the catalyst in the 1980s. He used the body's own enzymes as a model. His career as a green chemist started in his native New Zealand where he worked as a chemist at a refrigeration plant. He discovered the company knowingly exposed workers to benzene, a solvent and known carcinogen.

COLLINS: Just in lunch with them I'd hear about their headaches and their blood noses and I realized, my goodness, these are signature benzene intoxication conditions. I got every paper I could and gave it to the chief chemist and I can still remember his jaw hitting the floor when I gave the report to him.

FRAZIER: Collins is one of two Pennsylvania professors to receive the EPA's Presidential Green Chemistry Award. The other is Eric Beckman, the Bevier professor of chemical engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Beckman has been working on an alternative to Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC. That's the ubiquitious white pipe used in plumbing. PVC is strong and impermeable. It also contains chlorine, and chlorine requires intensive amounts of electricity to produce.

BECKMAN: About 1 to 2 percent of the world's electricity goes into making chlorine, and a third of all that chlorine produced goes into making PVC. On the good side, PVC as a polymer works really well.

FRAZIER: Beckman's trying to find a material which does the same job as PVC, without the chlorine. He's found a novel way to make pipes with polypropolene and natural fibers, potentially solving a huge environmental problem. But Beckman acknowledges that his team and the lab Terry Collins runs at Carnegie Mellon are exceptions. University chemists typically stay away from the field because of a lack of funding.

BECKMAN: If you look at federal research programs, the slice that's dedicated to green chemistry research is vanishingly small. It's really hard to see because it's so tiny, if you compare it to say, nanotechnology.

FRAZIER: Which pulls in almost $400 million a year in federal research grants. A recent study found the federal government funded less than $10 million for green chemistry research. So you might ask yourself, who's funding this stuff, anyway? The answer may surprise you.

FADE IN SOUND: PPG Pump sound-reactor

FRAZIER: Big business, it turns out, is in the vanguard of some green chemistry initiatives.

KAHLE: This apparatus is designed to allow us to incorporate bio-based feedstocks into our next generation of products- we're very optimistic that it's going to provide us some unique opportunities to reduce the need for oil-based feedstocks.

FRAZIER: Chuck Kahle is director of coatings research and development for PPG, the Pittsburgh-based glass and paint giant. He demonstrates a reactor full of gauges and tubes where chemists are trying out safer materials. The company won the EPA's Presidential green chemistry award in 2001 for creating a lead-free coating for cars. It's working on a similar coating for the aerospace industry, and it's looking for ways to cut back on oil consumption. Kahle wants the company to stay ahead of the curve on regulations, especially new, more restrictive laws in Europe. But advocates of green chemistry aren't necessarily looking for government regulation.

ANASTAS: I spent a decade of my life at a regulatory agency, at the EPA, and I think it's very important there's not a regulatory bone in green chemistry's body.

FRAZIER: Paul Anastas is often called the "father" of green chemistry. He coined the phrase while working as a White House scientist in the first Bush Administration. He later worked in the EPA under President Clinton. Instead of a stick for green chemistry, Anastas wants the government to dangle a carrot. A bill before Congress would do just that. It allocates about $30 million a year in existing funds to green chemistry. After breezing through the house last year, it stalled in front of the Senate. The house version has an unlikely sponsor.

GINGERY: I really embrace this bill and I'm very proud to introduce it.

FRAZIER: Georgia Republican Phil Gingery isn't known as an environmentalist. But you wouldn't know it in hearing him promote the Green Chemistry Bill.

GINGERY: We're talking about little children on their way to kindergarten having to breathe this air or drink this water.

FRAZIER: Politicians aren't alone in changing its outlook on green chemistry. Sushil Khetan came to work as a chemist at CMU's Green Ox lab seven years ago. He used to work for large pesticide companies in India. There, he worked on chemicals that increased crop yields, but also caused pollution.

CHANDRY: We were happy as long as we were able to achieve what we wanted to achieve, but never looked at the negative side. And if we look into those possible negative consequences well in time and take care of them, we will have a sustainable life.


FRAZIER: Khetan and others hope that sustainability becomes a key element for chemists of the future.

For the Allegheny Front, this is Reid Frazier.