James Clark: ‘I hate waste in any sense’

My involvement in green chemistry goes way back, long before it was even called green chemistry. In the late 1980s I got collaborating with a company that was quite new. It was pretty obvious that the stuff they were doing in real scale was rather nasty actually, in terms of it was very wasteful, using lots of hazardous reagents. We started playing around in the lab, just looking at ways to try and reduce the environmental impact of their big processes. That was just beginning to get momentum when the US EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], Paul Anastas and John Warner and so on came up with the terminology green chemistry. We thought great, this is what we’re doing. It gave us a bit of momentum to do more and more.

In the early days funding was difficult to get. In fact, in some of our early funding applications we had to use the word clean instead of green because green was considered to be politically a bit risky. Many of the larger traditional companies didn’t quite know what green meant and saw it as a threat to them, and academia was also very conservative and reluctant to do anything different. Chemistry had been ticking along quite happily without a lot of massive change and I think we threatened that.

I learned pretty quickly that me going around to a company, knocking on the door and saying, ‘hey guys, you should change your process’, wasn’t a very good way to do things. Legislation like Reach has really had a big impact because it’s basically saying there are many chemicals that you just can’t use anymore. And the fact that customers have become much more aware about green issues has worked its way back up the supply chain.