The Chancellor's column

November 2008

Green chemistry

All year I have heard references to Monash’s Centre for Green Chemistry. Leading edge. Best in Australia. But what does it mean? What is green chemistry?

I visited the Centre in July 2008 and was given an informative tour by its Director, Professor Milton Hearn. Listening to Milton’s enthusiastic vision for the Centre cleared the cobwebs for me.

The Centre’s purpose is to develop manufacturing techniques that will optimise the use of scarce resources. To do so, modern manufacturing processes must increase their material and energy conversion efficiencies. Simultaneously, the processes being developed at the Centre for Green Chemistry aim to minimise environmental impact by eliminating hazards and waste.

The essence of green chemistry is summed up in one of the guiding vision statements of the Centre: “It is better to prevent waste than to treat or clean up waste after it is formed.” The ideal green manufacturing process generates no waste at all.

The 80 staff and research students in the Centre are sprawled across three buildings, with the labs in one of the buildings appropriately painted green. The easiest way to understand the purpose of green-chemistry research is to look beyond the paint scheme into some of the Centre’s specific projects.

A particularly relevant one during the current worldwide oil shortage is a project to extract from agricultural waste various chemicals that would otherwise be sourced from oil. The lignocelluloses in waste paper, wheat stalks, sugar-cane bagasse and other materials can be used to produce a variety of industrially important chemical compounds, including fuels such as methyltetrahydrofuran (MTHF) and methyl levulinate that can be used in vehicles instead of petrol and diesel.

Another project is seeking environmentally friendly materials that can replace the toxic chrome in anticorrosion coatings.

Yet another project is developing the use of biological enzymes and benign catalysts for the formation of some of the plastics used in household electrical appliances and in cars. If successful, this bio-friendly approach will replace the current industrial processes that rely on dangerous toluene or benzene solvents.

The world is running out of resources. Twenty-five per cent of our energy consumption is in manufacturing. We should aspire to zero waste. The international academies of engineering and technological sciences have identified strategies for highly efficient conversion and reuse of matter and energy as one of the major ways to improve sustainability. Monash University’s Centre for Green Chemistry is helping to lead the way.

Dr Alan Finkel AM (BE 1976, PhD 1981)
Chancellor
Monash University