Implementing Green Chemistry Post-Pandemic: Challenges and Opportunities for Business- Part II
The global Coronavirus pandemic has ushered in a period of uncertainty and unprecedented economic disruption. Conditions have become exceedingly difficult for many businesses, and this has had immense implications for innovators working in sustainability and green chemistry. In the first part of this post, I laid out what I believed were four major challenges for implementing green chemistry in business. To recap, these challenges include an unfavourable environment for investing in new technologies, a near exclusive public focus on the pandemic, increasing difficulties for global implementation, and a shift in collaboration to online platforms. Fortunately, innovators are infinitely adaptable and bring significant creativity in meeting these challenges. Perhaps most importantly, the greater challenge of global sustainability and the demand for greener solutions will remain long after this global health crisis has passed. With this as the prime motivation, I wanted to focus this second part of the post on discussing opportunities for green chemists to make an impact in the post-pandemic world.
When I say opportunities, I should clarify that I mean seeking to use the change in business and societal conditions to implement an idea (i.e., a business, technology, partnership, etc.) that would not have been previously economically viable. I do not mean opportunity in terms of taking advantage of a bad human situation (the pandemic) as a way to make money, but rather looking at the bad situation through the lens of how we can implement technological and business solutions that can make our society more resilient to catastrophes like our current one, grow our economy, and secure a better quality of life for everyone.
What are some trends that will shape the next several years? Will new industries or economic approaches emerge from the economic devastation of the last few months? It really is impossible to predict specifics. However, the pandemic and the accompanying economic fallout have revealed several challenges that governments and businesses will need to address.
First, the Coronavirus crisis has shown how fragile our supply of critical items is in the age of globalization and “just-in-time” supply methods. Healthcare systems have been especially hard hit as demand for diagnostic tools and PPE has outstripped the capacity to source them. This crisis of supply should force governments and businesses that rely on essential items to seek faster and more secure methods of obtaining them, and to develop supply chains that are less subject to global competition. This has potential implications for designing new materials and innovating to meet the changing demand.
As I had written in the first part of this post, the world economy and the systems built up around certain commodities have been knocked out of equilibrium. Oil and gas prices are the most important examples. While the cheaper prices for petroleum products reduces raw material costs for making all sorts of polymers and commodity chemicals, this savings is likely small compared to the cost of manufacture and isn’t helpful if demand for such downstream products continues to be low. Commodity chemical producers may take a hit from economic conditions, but they have established infrastructure and a product that will eventually recover in demand. For innovators, higher-value and niche products and technologies offer an opportunity to minimize the effects of the global demand crash.
The bigger context for innovators in sustainability is that the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic will be long-term. The economic recovery will take years. The 2008 recession was a major economic event that is still affecting society over a decade later, but this crisis and its economic fallout will be much bigger and just as prolonged. While best time to be inventing in response to the pandemic is now, the window for overcoming technological and business hurdles in getting these inventions to market may be wider than under other circumstances. This could be helpful for researchers in chemistry where long timelines and intensive development programs are typical.
Opportunities
1. Massive demand for materials and technologies that will address the pandemic: We are only a few months into the pandemic and have seen a large ramp-up in R&D activity toward a vaccine and treatments effective toward the Coronavirus. The medical response is obviously going to be immense. If a vaccine is developed, the campaign to vaccinate as much of the population as rapidly as possible will be the largest public health initiative in decades, if not of all time. Not only will large amounts of raw materials and significant manufacturing efforts be needed to create a vaccine, we will need a large volume of medical-grade materials to package, deliver, and administer the vaccine. As an example, Chemjobber recently retweeted speculation that the world may not have the capacity to make enough medical-grade glass. I believe there will be many other materials that will become needed urgently as a direct result of the public health response. These needs should get green chemists thinking about opportunities to create better materials and more efficient ways to make them.
Other medical technologies continue to be in high demand. A robust testing program will be critical for reopening the economy and helping people feel safe in public. Current testing relies on amplifying viral genetic material from a test swab using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology and suffers from long turnaround times and low sensitivity. There is a need for better approaches. A test that gives more accurate results in less time would be an immense benefit to society in dealing with this virus. Chemists should be collaborating with biochemists and molecular biologists to understand the molecular targets to use in testing and lend their expertise in developing the chemistry needed for these diagnostic tools. Additionally, green chemists can think about ways to implement better processes for making the chemical reagents needed for testing.
Disinfection technologies will also be extremely important as society begins to reopen. Public agencies, workplaces, stores, hospitals, and schools will need to implement robust programs of disinfecting common surfaces. Many disinfectant wipes incorporate quaternary ammonium surfactants (quats) as their active ingredient. This is an opportunity for chemists to be designing and implementing safer and greener disinfectants. A disinfectant that is active specifically toward Coronavirus (and its lipid envelop) may lead to a safer product than those using traditional broad-spectrum disinfectants while still being market viable.
2. Implementing technologies that incorporate circularity and greener systems: The immense demand for materials that will come from the public health campaign and the need to source materials reliably are opportunities to implement circularity. One example of this is the overwhelming demand for PPE. Problems sourcing PPE in a timely way has prompted efforts to disinfect and safely reuse these items. Many other materials needed to combat the pandemic will be in high demand. This should prompt chemists to be thinking about ways in which current materials can be readily recycled, or how new materials can be invented with use and easy recycling or reuse as primary design goals.
I believe this approach could work well for higher-value materials which are under less cost pressure and for items where there is significant motivation to streamline and control the supply chain. For example, N95 masks are manufactured by 3M in the USA using refined wood pulp material sourced and processed in British Columbia. A technology that allows such masks or the material incorporated into them to be readily recycled or reused and implemented on a large scale would offer an alternative, secure source of these critical items while improving the sustainability of such products. While this is an obvious example, the effects of the pandemic on materials sourcing will be felt across many manufacturing segments. This may also be an opportunity for chemical recycling (breaking polymers down into their constituent monomers) to gain traction for certain materials.
Innovators who are working on technologies incorporating circularity or system-based design should make the point that circularity can security and flexibility to the supply chain. This has the potential to be a major part of the value proposition for these technologies.
3. Development of new infrastructure or the chance to repurpose existing infrastructure: Chemical innovations need a significant amount of equipment to produce material on scale and get it to market. Unfortunately, investment for infrastructure dedicated for new green chemistry being brought to market has been scarce. The alternative has been for innovators and entrepreneurs to seek out partners with the facilities and scale-up expertise needed to produce material and get it to market. This can work well, however, the lack of appropriate infrastructure is still a barrier for those looking to scale their technologies. Production facilities are typically designated for making narrow product lines and repurposing them to make other materials requires time and investment that corporations are hesitant to make. I wonder whether the rapid change in economic conditions, with demand having crashed for certain materials and demand for other items expected to jump, could change the business calculus and favour either investment in new facilities or a repurposing of existing infrastructure.
The argument for new infrastructure would be to construct new, modern, facilities that can be adaptable and responsive to both the current economic situation but also for changing future needs. Governments also want their countries to have sufficient capacity to make critical materials and decrease their reliance on imports. With a vaccine hopefully not far away, governments will aim to ensure their citizens can get timely access to vaccination. There will likely be significant public investment in new or repurposed fermentation and chemical processing needed to meet the needs of the coming public health initiative. If done smartly, this investment could be leveraged for future needs in synthetic biology and greener technologies relying on fermentation facilities.
4. Greater adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies and data responsive systems: Beyond better infrastructure needed for scaling chemistry, the pandemic has highlighted the need for entirely new, flexible, and data-driven methods of making things and also delivering rapidly on R&D efforts. This will be a rational response that will take greater ownership of the supply chain while maintaining cost effectiveness. For manufacturing, we will see greater development in 3D printing methods that can be adaptable to produce parts for different applications using different materials. There are opportunities to approach certain manufacturing challenges using numerous smaller, distributed systems that can produce components for niche applications on demand. For chemical manufacturing, there is an opportunity to further expand the use continuous flow and continuous processing over batch reactors and approaches. New methods can be invented so that they incorporate the principles of green chemistry, but it is up to green chemists and engineers to be at the forefront of designing and implementing these new approaches.
Smarter methods will also likely find greater adoption in R&D work, including the greater use of high-throughput experimentation (HTE) and automated systems. Tools such as Lee Cronin’s Chemputer or similar approaches should gain greater traction as scientists aim to do more work quicker, and with less time spent in lab doing physical manipulations or babysitting instruments. The self-isolation and time many researchers have spent recently working from home could be a tipping point for greater use of these technologies, and for some industry labs there may be no going back. Since small scale experiments and data driven HTE is a green approach for doing chemistry research, this should have positive implications for sustainability in R&D. However, there is always room for further invention and implementation in improving the speed and reliability of these approaches.
Conclusion
It has been a difficult couple of months, and it will be a long while before people are feeling at all normal. However difficult times and times of great change really do present opportunities to examine how things have been done, where we have fallen short, and most importantly, how we can design and build systems that serve us better in the future. I wrote this piece as a way of seeing some optimism in the current situation. The human and societal devastation caused by the pandemic has been difficult to watch, however as scientists and innovators it should harden our resolve to invent solutions for the immediate need and for future public health crises. Green chemistry can have a huge role to play in shaping technologies that become part of our post-pandemic future, but it will be up to us to seize opportunities and demonstrate how sustainable and safer chemistry is a critical component of environmental and economic well-being.