Credit: Nathan Walker, CC BY 2.0

Dave Kepler, chief sustainability officer at Dow Chemical Co., believes that to meet the demands of a burgeoning population, we will need more sustainable products and infrastructure in short, a more sustainable economy.

Writing for GreenBiz, Kepler says sustainable chemistry will play a key role in meeting the increasing demands for material goods in an environment of tight resources and energy supply. He writes that more than 95 percent of manufactured goods rely on certain chemical building blocks somewhere in their value chains that is, basic chemicals from which other chemicals get made. For that reason, integrating sustainability and green chemistry concepts sustainable chemistry as a building block is a vitally important part of building a more sustainable economy.

Dows sustainability strategy includes a set of four pillars of sustainable chemistry:

Kepler says Dows green chemistry efforts have led to products such as roofing shingles with integrated photovoltaics that make harnessing the power of the sun affordable, advanced lithium-ion batteries for improved hybrid and electric vehicle efficiency, corn seed traits that increase crop productivity and a joint venture with Mitsui in Brazil to make plastics from sugar cane.

That last detail making plastics from sugar cane is intriguing, especially in light of a recent article, Status Report: Green Chemistry for Polymers, by Sally Humphreys of research firm Applied Market Information. The article discusses a wide variety of efforts in the plastics industry to employ biological substitutes for fossil fuels as feedstocks for producing polymers.

Humphreys also highlights efforts in Brazil to produce plastics from sugar cane:

The Brazilian sugar cane industry is the largest in the world. [Brazilian petrochemical firm] Braskem has used this sugar as a source of feedstock to make its green polyethylene and polypropylene with current capacities at 200 and 30 kilotonnes per year respectively. 86.5 tons of sugar cane gives 7,200 liters of ethanol and 3 tonnes of polyethylene. Brazil has vast areas of arable land that could be used to develop this industry and Braskem is studying all aspects including ways to increase yield.

Sugar cane field in Brazil. Credit: Maria Hsu, CC BY 2.0

As another example, Ford Motor Co. has been testing the use of a soy polyol-based polyurethane foam, a bio-thermoplastic urethane (TPU) developed from renewable sources.

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Green Chemistry Carving a Bigger Role in Sustainable Manufacturing