Greener by design

Green chemistry has hit a milestone. It’s been 25 years since the 12 principles that have guided its development were first proposed by Paul Anastas and John Warner. But what has the field accomplished in this time? And what can we still expect from it?

While Anastas and Warner are sometimes called ‘the fathers of green chemistry’ the concept dates further back and has its roots in the 1980s and 1990s. At that time chemistry had something of an image problem. The industry it birthed had come to be seen by the public as smelly, dirty and polluting. Green chemistry offered a way to revitalise the chemical enterprise. What Anastas and Warner did was to codify some of the ideas in this developing field, and this struck a chord with many environmentally-conscious chemists. In 2019, chemical production was forecast to double by 2030, so clearly cleaner, greener ways to produce the raw materials for modern life are urgently needed.