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EVERY time Earth Day is celebrated, the chemical industry takes a
beating.
This year, opprobrium was heaped on plastics and
agricultural chemicals.
A legislator announced that she would sponsor a
bill that would proscribe all plastics, not knowing perhaps that
plastics is an all-purpose name for a wide range of products that
are ubiquitous as well as indispensable.
Agro-chemicals include not only fertilizers,
herbicides and pesticides but also preparations that make chicken,
pig and fish farming possible and at the same time protect human
health.
Organic farming sounds fine but I doubt if it
can sustain large-scale food production.
This is not to say that the chemical industry
should be allowed free rein to do what it pleases. Some of its
products have been found to be harmful to the environment and toxic
to human beings. We should be on guard but selective and rational in
what to prohibit.
It was not always like this. There was a time
when industrial chemistry was seen as a boon and not a bane.
Remember the 1935 slogan of Du Pont? It promised
to deliver “Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry.”
Du Pont has since lowered its voice.
Industrial chemistry became a social and
economic force when Fritz Haber, the German physical chemist, solved
the problem of making ammonia from ambient nitrogen. His discovery
was heaven-sent. Germany was on the brink of famine because its
access to Chilean nitrates, the main raw material for fertilizer,
was cut by the war. But it took Carl Bosch, a chemical engineer, to
industrialize Haber’s discovery. Synthetic ammonia provided
Germany not only with the fertilizer it needed to grow food but also
the material to make explosives. Industrial chemistry has always
been double-edged.
In the 1920s, the petrochemical industry grew
when chemical engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) devised quantitative tools to analyze fractional distillations
and the Dow Chemical Co. perfected continuous automatic control
technology.
However, the substitution of a cheaper synthetic
product for a natural one could be said to have begun in 1861 when
Alexander Parkes, an English chemist, patented a malleable material
from nitrocellulose and wood naptha that he named Parkesine. It was
a commercial failure until he and Daniel Spill put on the market a
concoction of nitrocellulose, alcohol, camphor and castor oil that
they called Xylonite. Combs, shirt collars, knife handles and other
devices were manufactured in large quantities from Xylonite.
Thereafter, products with trademarks like nylon
and freon that have become common nouns—all based on
petroleum—quickly found favor in the marketplace.
With the spread of the internal combustion
engine, gasoline, kerosene, solvents, lubricants, coolants,
anti-freeze and synthetic polymer products to make artificial rubber
followed in quick succession.
Public perception of the chemical industry
turned negative when it was found that lead tetraethyl, the
anti-knock additive in gasoline, and chloroflurocarbons in
refrigerators and airconditioners were harmful to both humans and
to the ozone layer that protected the Earth from ultraviolet rays.
But it was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in
1962 that decisively turned public opinion against synthetic
chemicals particularly against DDT. It was banned in most countries
with disastrous consequences for malaria control and eradication.
To restore the chemical industry to its former
status as a force for good, American chemical companies launched the
Responsibility Care Program under which they agreed “constantly
and continuously to improve performance—no matter what base they
start from—through the implementation of a series of codes of
performance objectives addressing community awareness and emergency
response, pollution prevention, process safety, employee health and
safety, distribution and product stewardship . . .” Only firms
that abide by these standards can join the American Chemical
Manufacturers’ Association.
Chemical technology is neither good nor bad in
itself. However, it has unforeseen consequences especially when
applied on a massive scale.
Perhaps the solution is to revive the chemurgic
movement that was begun in the US in the 1930s by Francis Garvan and
William J. Hale. Chemurgic’s aim was to use surplus farm produce
as the raw materials of the chemical industry. These are cellulose,
vegetable oil and alcohol.
With biofuels, especially cellulosic ethanol and
jatropha diesel fuel, sugarcane, sugar beets and plant cellulose to
make biodegradable plastics, we are already on the chemurgic track.
Nobody knows when these products will become
economically viable but instead of excoriating chemistry we should
encourage more organic chemists to look deeper into fermentation and
catalysis as the basic processes to produce the substitutes for the
petroleum-and coal-based products that we use almost mindlessly
today.
The answer is green chemistry.
opinion@manilatimes.net
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