Dave Kepler, chief sustainability officer at Dow Chemical Co., believes that to meet the demands of a burgeoning population, “we will need more sustainable products and infrastructure — in short, a more sustainable economy.”
Writing for GreenBiz, Kepler says “sustainable chemistry” will play a key role in meeting the increasing demands for material goods in an environment of tight resources and energy supply. He writes that more than 95 percent of manufactured goods rely on certain “chemical building blocks” somewhere in their value chains — that is, basic chemicals from which other chemicals get made. For that reason, “integrating sustainability and green chemistry concepts — ‘sustainable chemistry’ — as a building block is a vitally important part of building a more sustainable economy.”
Dow’s sustainability strategy includes a set of four “pillars” of sustainable chemistry:
Holistic design — a “cradle-to-cradle” approach to product design, considering the entire life cycle of the product from production to use to end of life
Atom economy — regarding every atom as a valuable resource and creating processes in which nothing is wasted
Energy footprint — minimizing life-cycle energy consumption of a product
Reduced hazard — designing safety, health and environmental protection into products and processes
Kepler says Dow’s green chemistry efforts have led to products such as roofing shingles with integrated photovoltaics that make harnessing the power of the sun affordable, advanced lithium-ion batteries for improved hybrid and electric vehicle efficiency, corn seed traits that increase crop productivity and a joint venture with Mitsui in Brazil to make plastics from sugar cane.