Organizer: David Leahy, Associate Director, Process Chemistry Development, Takeda Pharmaceuticals
The development of new synthetic methodologies and strategies has been the cornerstone upon which sustainable industrial processes are built. The pure research advances arising from academia fuel the world’s industrial innovation, while also training the scientific leaders of tomorrow. This special session highlights the research of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows across the broader organic chemistry community which has the potential to impact sustainable industrial chemistry.
**Students accepted to speak in this session will receive a travel award, provided by the ACS GCI Pharmaceutical Roundtable.** Get the details of the Travel Awards here.
Organizer: Michael Kopach, Senior Research Advisor, Eli Lilly
Peptides have gained increased interest as therapeutics over the past few decades, largely due to their advantageous properties including high specificity and affinity, as well as superior safety and tolerance. These properties make peptide drugs more desirable than small molecule drugs in select disease classes including cancer, diabetes, degenerative and infectious diseases. Currently, there are over 60 FDA approved peptide drugs on the market and over 600 either in clinical trials or pre-clinical development. Peptide-based therapeutic agents have the potential to replace many existing small molecule-based therapies in the near future. Likewise great strides have been made in oligonucleotide therapies and delivery technologies over the past five years.
Compared to the synthetic processes for small molecule drugs, the environmental impact of this technology has not garnered much attention, in part because the high potency of peptide and oligonucleotide drugs has rendered supply needs significantly lower than traditional small molecule drugs. However, market forecasts indicate potential for a significant increase in high volume peptide and oligonucleotide processes. Recent investigations have revealed that, on average, producing 1 kg of peptide or oligonucleotide products require over 5 to 15 metric tons of solvent, significantly higher than all types of synthetic small molecule. In addition, the current state of the art in peptide and oligonucleotide syntheses utilize primarily legacy technologies, with little focus on green chemistry and engineering with multiple usages of highly hazardous reagents and solvents. Contributing to the poor environmental profile for peptide and oligonucleotide products is the ubiquitous use of chromatography. Recognizing these unmet environmental needs the ACS Pharmaceutical Roundtable recently founded a team focused on improving sustainability practices in peptide and oligonucleotide syntheses. The groups initial contribution is focused on stimulating innovations in peptide syntheses (J. Org. Chem., 2019, 84 (8), pp 4615–4628). This session will explore how improved synthetic methodologies, safer coupling reagents, solvent selection, and minimization of chromatography play a vital role in improving the sustainability both peptide and oligonucleotide syntheses.
Organizers: Cindy Hong, Sr. Scientist, Merck; Kevin Maloney
The facile access to engineered enzymes has led to the widespread adoption of biocatalysis in complex molecule synthesis in both academic as well as industrial laboratories. This session will attempt to highlight the mostly untapped potential of bio-catalysis and protein engineering in developing new synthetic methodologies that unlock new chemical space and are green and sustainable. In addition, the session will highlight the chemistry and engineering challenges associated with developing biocatalytic transformations, and how computational chemistry along with a detailed mechanistic understanding can aid in developing robust processes.
Organizers: Andrew D. Sutton, Los Alamos National Laboratory; Chris Chuck, The University of Bath, UK; Asanga B Padmaperuma, Sr. Research Scientist, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Plastics have only been in large-scale production since the 1950s but in that short time approximately 8300 million metric tons (Mt) of virgin plastics have been produced of which, 6300 Mt of plastic waste has been generated with 79 % of that now in landfills or in the environment such as “Great Pacific garbage patch.” While this is a major environmental problem, it can also be considered to be a huge resource opportunity if we can develop approaches and methods to reintroduce this carbon back into the supply chain and avoid the accumulation of single use carbon.
The rationale behind this symposium is to consider all aspects of the plastic cycle and how we can use this discarded carbon resource to reduce petroleum and energy resources, reduce environmental impacts and increase global sustainability. This will encompass:
• Development of new polymers with improved performance to provide market pull
• Chemical and biologic recycle of polymers
• Development of biodegradable polymers to environmentally benign materials
• Challenges in replacing petroleum-based polymeric materials
• Economic and environmental factors and barriers to a circular-plastic economy
• Methods to upcycle plastics
Organizers: Anna Montgomery, Executive Director, Northwest Chemistry; Lauren Heine, Director of Safer Materials & Data Integrity, ChemForward; Ray Garant, ACS
This session will cover frameworks, databases, certifications, and information hubs for safe, sustainable product design. Products based on sustainable materials support a circular economy, create life-friendly chemistry, restore natural capital, and support a just and inclusive society. This requires systems thinking to holistically address sustainability alignment between products and materials. Diverse information types are required to understand how well a product or material meets these criteria, but can be challenging to identify and use, especially for product designers.
What information needs are necessary in order to meet the demands for designing products for sustainable material flows? Who is meeting these needs, and what challenges are they facing in disseminating and organizing this information so that it is actionable? Sustainability must be considered during the design phase to avoid sunk cost fallacies leading to the continued development of regrettable products. Products in the midst of being designed rarely have robust datasets describing their life cycle impacts, hazards, and other sustainability characteristics. How do innovators, entrepreneurs, and product developers access sufficient information during the design phase to make informed decisions about the sustainability of their products? How do chemical manufacturers communicate the sustainability of their materials?
Many products are developed with sustainability claims, but further examination reveals trade-offs between sustainability benefits. For example, food packaging designed using agricultural waste and marketed as compostable may contain per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), which do not break down in compost and are persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic. Our symposium will explore the tools and databases available to avoid these situations, both for product designers and for purchasers and others further up the supply chain.
Alternatives assessment has the potential to identify preferable chemicals and preferable products with a clear description of any sustainability trade-offs. However, it is challenging to gather sufficient data on new and emerging chemicals and products to equitably compare them to existing and established chemicals and products. As syntheses and processes are optimized for the status quo, new chemicals and products often fail to perform to the same level. Our symposium will explore modeling tools and alternatives assessment methodologies that enable accurate and actionable comparisons.
Organizers: Saskia van Bergen, Washington Department of Ecology; Robert Giraud, Principal Consultant, Chemours/University of Delaware; Amy Cannon, Executive Director, Beyond Benign; Laura M. Reyes, Paul Thornton
Large-scale collaborative projects have the potential to leverage multi-company/multi-institutional resources to address sustainability challenges. However, the potential of such collaborations remains largely unrealized as it is difficult to establish new relationships and appropriate models that allow different groups to work together effectively. Implementing system-wide changes across industries and in society will require prolonged cooperation between multiple partners and diverse stakeholders, but to date these large-scale collaborative efforts are rare. Even smaller-scale collaborations such as academics aiming to partner with external organizations or an industry to advance the applicability of their innovations face obstacles to building a mutually beneficial project. This session will focus on how large interdisciplinary and/or cross-sector collaborative projects in green chemistry can be conceived, organized, and brought to fruition with results that can have lasting system-wide impact.
There are several key questions we aim to address: First, what are the challenges to a great collaborative project with multiple stakeholders, and how can they be overcome? Secondly, what components of a project are essential to the success of a collaboration? Finally, what other types of collaborations are necessary to help solve multidimensional sustainability and green chemistry challenges?
Diving deeper into the diversity of collaborative efforts, we invite submissions from anyone who has had first-hand experience participating in a large collaboration, either across scientific disciplines (e.g., chemistry, engineering, toxicology), and/or across sectors (e.g., industry, academia, government). The session will benefit from a diversity of perspectives. Speakers may include coordinators or organizers of multi-stakeholder collaborative projects, as well as individual scientists or contributors to such collaborations. Designated projects or challenges that seek to address an industry need (“technology pull”) will be explored, as will those efforts where innovators actively search for specific market fits for their technologies (“technology push”). The session will provide examples and engage participants in the discussion of how better collaborations can be identified, fostered, and achieved. Sharing the perspectives and lessons from this symposium will help accelerate implementation of systemic changes in sustainability by jump-starting the collaborations needed to advance the widespread practice of green chemistry and engineering across various systems.
Organizers: Laura M. Reyes, PhD; Natalie O’Neil, PhD, Beyond Benign
This symposium is an informative session focused on the numerous, diverse and non-linear career paths available to students under the general umbrella of green chemistry and engineering. Simultaneously, this symposium aims to demonstrate the benefits that a background knowledge in green chemistry and engineering has in the eyes of an employer and the importance of marketing non-obvious skills to potential employers, e.g. expertise in systems thinking, safety, scale-up considerations, economics, collaborative approaches, science communication, etc. By assembling a series of career path examples from speakers, this symposium will directly address students’ ubiquitous question of what career options are available to them, and how they might go about pursuing them. Although students are the target audience for this symposium, all audiences would be welcome, this symposium could be similarly valuable to those further in their career paths who may find themselves unemployed or otherwise facing a change in employment. Anyone in established careers with a curiosity to learn about the career paths that their colleagues have pursued, or mentors to students seeking resources is also welcomed. To create an interactive environment, a panel discussion to address questions from the audience will follow the speaker presentations. This panel discussion will be open-ended to build on themes brought up in the career presentations.
The global system of green chemistry is an international network of networks. The reason that understanding this complex sstem is important is because it is at the intersections and interfaces of these various networks that the greatest chance for transformative innovation takes place. In our language and descriptions, we often try to simplify this universe into easily fragmented sectors (e.g., industry, government, academia, and NGO’s), or even bifurcate the world e.g., domestic/international, industrialized world/emerging nations, global corporation/start-up, research/education. While these categorizations make things seem simpler, they lose the richness of the capacity of the network and the fullness of the potential for bringing about positive change in the green chemistry world. It is precisely by understanding where multi-dimensional partnerships can be built, established infrastructure can be leveraged, and cultural threads aligned, that green chemistry has its highest opportunities to have its most important impact.
Organizers: Michael Kirschner, President, Design Chain Associates, LLC; Dr. Leo T. Kenny, President, Planet Singular; John Katz, Pollution Prevention Coordinator, US Environmental Protection Agency
The supply chain of the electronics industry is long, vast and convoluted. Improving the sustainability of product and process chemistry is challenging because chemical selection is normally done (often far) upstream of the brand owners and, given the nature of the products, many electronics companies have little or no chemistry expertise. Poor and inadequate processes to connect downstream concerns and requirements regarding environmental/human health performance with upstream decision points limits opportunities for implementing green chemistry and engineering solutions.
Challenges include chemistry knowledge; toxicology expertise; supply chain communication and motivation; management engagement; material composition collection, information, and interpretation; lack of information on how suppliers use chemicals; a wide diversity in processes where chemicals are used, and lack of worker knowledge of – and control over – the hazards associated with the chemicals they use; intellectual property concerns; cost, volume, quality, and availability of solutions; and many others. But the industry is huge and innovative, and opportunities abound throughout it if adequate visibility and incentive can be provided to design out issues up front.
We seek speakers who can highlight where opportunities exist and solutions are needed; areas where solutions are being developed and implemented for materials, processes and products across the semiconductor and electronics design and manufacturing supply chains; and examples of how and where industry, academia and government can and are working together.
Organizers: Samy Ponnusamy, Millipore Sigma and Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering; Srinivasan Ambatipati, McNeese State University
This session will highlight the processes that are inspired by novel design strategies to enable a circular-sustainable economy. Case studies will be presented to illustrate how industry/academia/NGO have successfully implemented novel design strategies to achieve circular-sustainable economy. The examples from the session will describe the design and approaches taken, the challenges faced and how a solution for the challenge was achieved. Also, this session will discuss the importance of implementing sustainability as a basic design criterion to successfully achieve a closed-loop economy.