The French government recently announced a large investment program for renewables and green chemistry. The investment, totaling 1.35 billion euros ($1.75 billion) will be allocated over the next four years.
Named “ Démonstrateurs énergies renouvelables et chimie verte ” – or renewable energy and green chemistry demonstration – this program plans to allocate 450 million euros in subsidies and 900 million euros in
J. Craig Venter, the genome pioneer, has created a “synthetic cell” by synthesizing a complete bacterial genome and using it to take over a cell. Venter’s breakthrough, reported in the online edition of Science, represents a preliminary step toward the goal of creating microbes from scratch in the lab and using them to make biofuels, vaccines, and other products.
Venter’s achievement could one day lead to a technology where, though engineering the genome, individual cells could be turned into their own miniature refineries for harvesting carbon dioxide and generating hydrocarbons.
In 2005, Venter — one of the first people to sequence the human genome, doing it faster and cheaper than government scientists — set up a company, Synthetic Genomics, to create synthetic cells, and the advance reported in Science represents a milestone for the company and for so-called synthetic biology.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is making it easier to find chemical information online. The EPA is releasing a database called ToxRefDB, which allows scientists and the interested public to search and download thousands of toxicity testing results on hundreds of chemicals.
ToxRefDB captures 30 years and $2 billion of federal required testing results. This is a handy regulatory and technical tool, and simplifies at least some of the required toxicity investigation research.
ToxRefDB provides detailed chemical toxicity data in an accessible format. It is a part of ACToR (Aggregated Computational Toxicology Resource), an online data warehouse that collects data from about 500 public sources on tens of thousands of environmentally relevant chemicals, including several hundred in ToxRefDB.
Insecticides such as DDT have long been used to combat the scourge of malaria in the developing world. But with the disease parasite becoming increasingly adept at resisting the chemical onslaught, some countries are achieving striking success by eliminating the environmental conditions that give rise to malarial mosquitoes.
For over half a century, the battle against malaria has been waged with powerful anti-malarial drugs and potent mosquito-killing insecticides, weapons born from the wonders of synthetic chemistry. In recent years, however, fed up with the financial and ecological drawbacks of chemical warfare, malarious communities from China to Tanzania to Mexico have been forging a new way to fight the scourge, one that draws inspiration from the lessons of ecology more than chemistry. Rather than attempt to destroy mosquitoes and parasites outright, these new methods call for subtle manipulations of human habitats and the draining of local water bodies — from puddles to irrigation canals — where malarial mosquitoes hatch.
The most striking example comes from Mexico, which has completely abandoned its previously lavish use of DDT in malaria control for insecticide-free methods and has seen malaria cases plummet.
Like many countries, Mexico for decades relied upon insecticides to fight the disease, by spraying mosquito-killing chemicals on the interior walls of homes where blood-feeding mosquitoes rest, among other methods. Between 1957 and 1999, taming Mexico’s malaria required 70,000 tons of DDT.
With nearly $800 billion in drugs sold worldwide, pharmaceuticals are increasingly being released into the environment. The “green pharmacy” movement seeks to reduce the ecological impact of these drugs, which have caused mass bird die-offs and spawned antibiotic-resistant pathogens.
The standard that new drugs be safe for human consumption was first enshrined in U.S. regulations in 1938, after an antibacterial drug dissolved in a poisonous solvent killed 100 children. Now, armed with a range of evidence suggesting that wildlife and human health may be threatened by pharmaceutical residues that escape into waterways and elsewhere, a growing band of concerned ecotoxicologists and environmental chemists are calling for yet another standard for new medications: that they be designed to be safe for the environment.
The movement for “green pharmacy,” as it has been dubbed, has grown as new technology has allowed scientists to discern the presence of chemicals in the environment at minute concentrations, revealing the wide dispersal of human and veterinary drugs across the planet.
The personal care industry has long demanded stricter standards for products labeled “natural,” and in February, the Natural Products Association (NPA), the group representing retailers and manufacturers including Whole Foods and Clorox Co., has released new standards for home-care products.
These include household cleaners for bathrooms and kitchen countertops and laundry detergents. Up until now, there has been no definition of the term “natural” within the home-care products industry.
Daniel Fabricant, NPA vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs, has been quoted as saying that many so-called natural cleaning products contain largely synthetic ingredients. And consumers are already confused about what makes products natural as well as organic.
As environmental concerns threaten to derail natural gas drilling projects across the country, the energy industry has developed innovative ways to make it easier to exploit the nation’s reserves without polluting air and drinking water.
Energy companies have figured out how to drill wells with fewer toxic chemicals, enclose wastewater so it can’t contaminate streams and groundwater, and sharply curb emissions from everything from truck traffic to leaky gas well valves. Some of their techniques also make good business sense because they boost productivity and ultimately save the industry money — $10,000 per well in some cases.