Join Vera Köster from @ChemistryViews as she explores sustainable chemistry with Prof. Klaus Kümmerer, @Leuphana, awardee of the Wöhler Award for Sustainable Chemistry 2023, to discuss innovation, education and the future of chemistry for a sustainable world.
🌱 Explore the broader definition of sustainable chemistry beyond green chemistry, encompassing energy efficiency, waste reduction, and renewable resources.
🌍 Hear about the necessary shift in education and research towards holistic approaches that prioritize environmental impact and long-term sustainability.
💡 Gain insights into Prof. Kümmerer’s personal motivations and advice for aspiring chemists, highlighting curiosity, perseverance, and critical thinking as essential qualities for driving sustainability in chemistry.
#gdch #chemistryresearch #sciencetalks #STEMinterview #academicinsights #professorlife #chemistryviews #scientificdiscussion #sustainablechemistry #environmentalscience #innovationinchemistry #STEM #sciencecommunication #sustainability #chemistrycommunity
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[Music] can you explain in one sentence what sustainable chemistry is sustainable chemistry is about how chemistry can contribute to sustainability so in fact it’s much more than green chemistry MH and can you say in one sentence what green chemistry is yeah Green chemistry is about um synthesis of chemicals or manufacturing of product sometimes process of synthesis doing with less energy doing with less waste and using renewable resources mhm and do you think already fried rer thought about sustainability I mean the term didn’t didn’t exist then but I could imagine in terms of at this time chemistry was let’s say or people lived closer to Nature or probably had more the feeling of being embedded and um that’s a feature of sustainable chemistry that we have to learn again to embed industrial chemistry to embed uh chemistry education more into the context Yeah in our world nowadays into the context of sustainability where we also have uh things that are closely related to Nature if you think of the planetary boundaries The Limited the limitations of resources the effects of chemicals in the environment and humans so in fact all around us uh where chemistry is embedded in between we have thought chemistry is above or independent of nature of of everything more or less yeah which is fostered by I would say the conventional chemistry education you are in a lab you are in an artificial situation you are going for new compounds which is at the heart of chemistry and is fine but um you do not yet think about um how will this really work out or in other words you get a textbook as a student at least was my experience and you go in the lab you do your practical and you think yeah that’s it that’s how it works MH yeah you’re not uh uh thinking about products you’re not thinking about industrial chemistry and you are not aware that many of the things you are reading in your textbook um is the result of a lot of let’s say PhD students and other students yeah how to generate the insights and we just are taking it or have taken it for granted M and so how is re research changing or education changing then I think education has to change in terms of looking a little bit more Beyond chemistry for what for whom as long as it’s a science and and as long as you are really in the lab uh and doing experiments there it’s fine then it’s uh as you could say it’s nonnormal formative it’s not depending on human uh value propositions uh chemistry or molecules and atoms do what they do under given conditions and if you want to get insights what they are doing that’s fine but nowadays students have to learn also about this embeddedness and think about what is the purpose or um sometimes I’m asking students ah you came up with a new reaction or new Catalyst or new application I wish you all the success to bring this into practice but have you ever thought what this would mean if your product if your process if your reaction would be applied in a 1,000 or 100,000 scale of tonnage what are the resources needed what are the the byproducts you for a long time we were only interested in yield we were not interested in the waste we are generating for example and this already uh we have to take into account teaching by the way waste is also a human concept nature does not tell us something about waste nature is just nature and chemistry as a natural science is just chemistry first of all um but it’s our human value propositions that we think waste is something we don’t want to have or waste should be avoided maybe because it creates costs maybe because it’s toxic yeah but then again it’s our value if we say um uh organisms in the in the environment should not be impacted or toxicity is bad nature just sees or sees inverted commas uh that there’s a effect and maybe Evolution will then uh uh find or come up with a with other organisms or whatsoever over time so we have to learn early on that we have the bigger picture um in our view or maybe this more systems thinking in education yeah system thinking is a very important word um in education but also in research also in industrial chemistry when designing a new product where you often need several chemicals for example uh because it emphasizes there is more than just this punctual thinking I’m now optimizing something from 99 95% um with respect to one two or three properties and I do not think for example how much resources will this cost how much energy um or how much waste this will generate at the end of the life of the product so we also have to think from the very beginning before we even start the synthesis if it’s not just for curiousness um what will be the end of it will it end up in the environment or is will it be a product that can be circulated or should be circulated yeah and according to this starting from this let’s say very end of the life cycle going back to the beginning of the life cycle we should think about which chemicals which products which materials we want to have and how to design them uh can you give examples from your research about for this yeah there are two FOC of my research one is typically in the lab and the other is more on the concept natur level in the lab or in material based research you could say um we are uh focusing on the benign by Design uh principle which is one of the green chemistry principles um that means to render molecules degradable in our case in the environment that’s because I have an background of environmental chemistry and for a long time I studied the presence and the risks of chemicals in the environment but at someday I was a little bit bored by this measuring the 500 compound and the 700 sample and doing the 400 risk assessment and nothing changes really so I became interested in how can we change this how can we from the very beginning avoid problems I think that’s at the heart of it and um if we are able to design chemicals Pharmaceuticals um in a manner that they are stable enough the lifetime is long enough in the area where they are applied but when they enter the environment for example The Aquatic environment that then are fast and completely degraded completely is also important because we have a lot of treatment processes for example on the one hand which result in just transforming the parent molecule to follow our products and often we do not even know how toxic these are what what is the Environmental fate and also if you think about only 20% of world’s waste water is treated so we need a solution which works everywhere and at this time um I also came across with screen chemistry on the 10th principle and said okay it’s written there but there have been only a few very how should I say uh uh uh simple examples and not completely to the end and not completely shown that it works and that’s uh what we did in the meantime so that was a journey of more or less 20 years yeah to demonstrate it’s feasible including Pharmaceuticals which we could patent uh that’s important not because we will get rich probably not but it demonstrates to Industry there’s a new business opportunity if you have new compounds that are patented and the core of it of this thinking is starting at the end of of life oh this chemical will probably go to the environment and then going back to the very first step how should a chemical look like and then thinking about which are the part of the molecule the core structure that is needed for a good performance and application and then identifying moities which can be changed and giving access to degradation to complete degradation mineralization in the environment chemists should think about kinetics about how halflife how long is this compound stable under which conditions that’s a sort of a key of it because conditions in the environment are different pH uh excess of light excess of water than in an application and by the way then after time we learned going for circular economy sometimes it might be helpful to have a very stable compound if you think of solvents if you can make sure that they do not go into the environment make them as stable as possible because then you can circulate and that saves your energy and and waste because there’s no need uh for new synthesis can you give one success example we had several examples where we can demonstrate this one is um yic liquids yeah uh which are more and more important not only as green solvents but also used for photovoltaics and and other uh energy applications and um that’s one example um we worked also um on Pharmaceuticals and there we could even patent a new compound yeah and we could show it it’s still active as it should be as an antibiotic it’s stable enough in the human body and as far as we could uh investigate has less unwanted side effects than the compound it could substitute and after its excretion it falls apart in two pieces and um there there’s much more improved uh degradability in the environment and to be honest we are not yet there there’s one part which is still slowly degradable but it’s much less active than the parent compound so in this case we are also addressing the issue of reducing the probability that resistant bacteria are collected so we are in two fields we are in hyene antibacterial resistance and environmental pollution and both we could with this approach much reduce and as for the time being we’re working on silicons which is another challenging very challenging task but it’s uh also very rewarding because we learn a lot and have a lot uh yeah real fun in in the in the working group and discussing with people and so when do you think will we see um really Cycles um um cular economy Cycles really working in the economy um many are already working yeah if you think about glass for example um others are just starting where we have to improve the infrastructure and as for more complex products we have also think about design we have to design for recycling or even if we go for Plastics so we have uh lots of polymer few basic polymers but we have up to 10 10,000 additives so we talk about Plastics but very often it’s not just the polymer or the polymer already includes different functionalities different types of atoms this we have to simplify else it will never work yeah and we have to depute the products if we have persistent and endocrine active flame retardant therein it will never work but also if this we have to to move out and um but also if the compounds are not toxic it’s a mixture and the mixture is always challenging to separate yeah you can do it sometimes mechan mechanically but if the additives are in there maybe you need chemistry and each separation each separation needs energy and results in waste that’s just because of thermodynamics that’s a message to my colleagues don’t forget thermodynamics many of the students do not like it but it’s so simp simple first law you will never win you can only Break Even Second Law you can only Break Even under perfect conditions s law sorry you will never reach perfect conditions and now look around our world if there were everything would be perfect there would not even there would not even be life yeah so we can’t avoid we can only try to lose as little as possible and now coming back to benign by Design we also need to design um complex products for recycling for example and we also researched on this now we are in the field of our conceptional work because we are not Material scientists but from the basic principles of chemistry and physics it’s easy to derive um if we want to cope with unnecessary entropy waste and energy losses material losses um in in circular economy in circulation um we have to simplify things we have for example uh an all level yeah maybe a a lower diversity of different atoms a lower diversity of molecules maybe less branching yeah um for example less additives or maybe even sometimes without um less different metals and then we go to the next step the building blocks also the same less of them maybe and and then thinking about which ones if I go for recycling I need separation first we should go for circulation but at the end of the day we have to go to recycling and the easier I can separate them the better so that could be one of the design principles we derived and last but not least we have to acknowledge circulation circular economy is not sustainable per se not everything which is greener fits into a circular economy is more sustainable and not everything which is part of a circular economy and is made for it does mean that U it’s at the lowest amount of energy needed it’s at the lowest amount of of toxicity resources needed but for example all the waste also recycling will create waste and we have to think of this also that that’s the challenge or the incentive of the future to do more with less and that’s quite normal I in science for example that’s okam Razer that’s a principle of scientific philosophy keep it as simple as possible and do you think this is a nice Vision or do you think this will really come true in maybe 5 years 10 years I have to confess I’m a bit biased no I’m really convinced because we see the the drivers are there and we see it if you look to Industry if you look on our chemistry Community the pressure is felt more and more people see resources are not endless more and more people see wow despite all what we have done this end of the pipe approaches we have done for 50 years which have been in some respect quite successful they are now coming to an end in terms of yes we have done a lot of but they will not be able to solve the real basic problems that are arising from the the huge amounts tonage we are using and the high diversity we have there and again it’s about yes we have to reduce what we are our turning around of material in time how fast in space and in diversity mhm MH so what inspired you to uh focus on sustainability in your research oh that’s a very good question I’ve taken it for long for granted yeah um it was not just one moment but at the one hand um I’m very fond of chemistry on the other hand maybe typical German uh fa I wanted to understand what keeps the world together but then also I wanted to contribute something yeah and making best of chemistry yeah I was for years I would not say depressed but I found it Such a Pity that people do not appreciate chemistry and what’s around us so if I talk to Layman I uh I always ask where is chemistry here in this room often there is silence but in fact everything is chemistry nowadays most synthetic chemistry or the result of it but also natural chemistry yeah and and therefore um yeah I wanted also to contribute with Environmental Protection so when I studied environmental chemistry was not really there but I went into this field and first time I noticed um people think we are a little bit crazy that’s not important and we can manage this easily and then after environmental chemistry was established I saw it’s not really solving the problems it’s a important tool to solve some problems and to gain knowledge what are the problems but not all of them and then we had the discussion about resources yeah and the limitation but that was very clear if you look the formula of a of a globe or of a ball you see it’s and it’s not endless yeah and energy it’s the same and um that was the point moving to the next step to say how could Solutions like positive uh things I was also a little bit bored or fed up with that I also always have to come up with problems without having a solution yeah and maybe another point is that yes I’m very interested in chemistry but chemistry is only part of life and what we have around us so life and and what we have is much more so I was interested in a lot of things just just for interest and maybe that’s also a message to the younger ones in school in in uh when you’re studying also to some do some things that are outside of your interest sometimes you have to do things I have a lot of examples my life do I really have to do this why why do I have to learn this or understand this later on I saw wow very helpful yeah or also being interested in culture and and and politics nowadays we talk about resources but resources is geopolitics without resources you will not understand the Iraqian War you will not understand the behavior of China you will not understand uh um um Ukrainian War etc etc so we’re coming back to the larger picture and the system thinking and do you have um maybe one sentence tip for somebody for chemist what can we do to um I don’t know change our mind uh that we think more of this larger picture of the systems thinking more sustainable be curious and if something works do not just stop thinking about why does it work and under which conditions and how how this relates to reality and what would be the result if you would be successful uccessful and do not give up if everyone tells you that does not work we have been told many times that does not work and I ask people where do you know from yeah we just know I said I am a Scientist I want to find out whether it really does not work or work so stay curious okay thank you very much my [Music] pleasure
2 Comments
Thank you, Professor Kümmerer!
Great interview on a very relevant topic!