Top 5 Green Chemistry Trends

/EINPresswire.com/ These five trends are some of the ways we're hearing that chemical companies are adopting green chemistry concepts for the corporate sector to gain a competitive advantage, make their offerings more sustainable, and fulfill corporate social responsibility mandates.

Assess the product life cycle: Chemical technology groups are now making more systematic efforts to define their product systems using life cycle assessments. This approach to identifying environmental and economic factors that can enhance the value proposition of a company's offering is an emerging way to compete in the chemical industry.

Focus on catalysis: Catalytic reagents are superior to stoichiometric reagents. Chemical companies are often seeking out new reaction conditions and methods that enhance their yield. Searching for and identifying the latest, innovative catalysts, using a workflow tool like Reaxys, a database of experimentally validated reaction and substance data, is one way to do that.

Use renewable feedstock: Use renewable raw material or feedstock whenever practical. From biopolymers to biopesticides to bio-based commodity chemicals and fuels, focusing on delivering sustainable products made from alternative sources is a major growth platform for chemical companies. Elsevier Biofuel is one such tool that enables comprehensive research in scientific, industrial, and commercial biofuel data.

Optimize processes: Process intensification is one of the most discussed technical topics across multiple sub-segments of the chemical industry. Smaller-scale intermediate and ingredient providers are focusing more on developing safe, continuous processes with microreactors. And high-volume commodity chemical producers continually seek smaller and more efficient plants to help address the problems of increasingly high costs of capital investment.

Do your research: We continue to hear that the value of researching what has already been done and what the latest technologies are. For example, using tools like SciVerse ScienceDirect — a database of more than 10 million peer-reviewed, full-text scientific journal articles and book chapters — is incomparable in helping to avoid costly mistakes, either in new product development, or process design and scale-up.

Learn more about using Reaxys, Elsevier Biofuel, or SciVerse ScienceDirect for your chemistry research at www.elsevierchem.com.