Peter Licence explains how resilient chemistry can ensure the long-term viability of the chemical industry and address global challenges through sustainable and innovative practices.
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Mewburn Ellis talks to Professor Peter Licence, Head of Chemistry and Director of the GSK Carbon Neutral Laboratory for Sustainable Chemistry at the University of Nottingham, and Editor-in-Chief of the American Chemical Society journals Sustainable Resource Management and Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering, about the concept of resilient chemistry.
Even as a person working within the broader chemical disciplines, you’d likely be forgiven for not being especially familiar with the relatively new subfield known as resilient chemistry. However, it’s key to the long-term viability of the chemical industry. Professor Peter Licence is one of the world’s leading thinkers in this field and part of his mission is to popularise the concept, which he sees as essential to the prosperity of western economies.
Licence describes resilient chemistry as ‘the next-click’ in the movement that began with green chemistry in the 1990s. Co-created by his good friend Paul Anastas in the 1990s, green chemistry was ‘a way of delivering molecules, processes and products that do little or no harm to the environment or to the people that use those molecules’. It was a subset of the general movement of sustainability in the chemical industry. As Licence puts it: ‘the purest form of the art’. Green chemistry has empowered more commercially viable sustainable chemistry.
Professor Peter Licence
Sustainable chemistry promises the same philosophy as green chemistry, but comes wrapped up in a practical package where the chemistry moves from the abstract to the industrial plant, with the vocabulary of the 3Ps: the triple bottom line of people, profit and the planet, all being pursued in harmony. Licence explains: ‘Sustainable chemistry has to take the best examples of green chemistry and place them into action, so that the science just doesn’t stay in the library – it moves to the plant and delivers impact, making life better, making processes more effective – critically, the green principles are being used.’ Licence’s colleague at the University of Nottingham and fellow green chemistry advocate, Sir Martyn Poliakoff, attributes one particular definition of sustainable chemistry to Licence as ‘green chemistry that makes money’. That brings us to the present day and our topic of resilient chemistry.
When we spoke, Licence had recently returned from Sweden where he helped draft The Stockholm Declaration on the Future of Chemistry. Hosted by the organising committee of the Nobel symposium, the declaration aims to bring sustainable and resilient chemistry to the forefront of chemists’ thinking, and contains five tenets:
- To take immediate action;
- To promote chemical processes and products that do no harm to people or the planet;
- To train the next generation of chemists to prioritise sustainability;
- To ensure open access to chemical data;
- To align government policy with sustainability and health.
So, we’re talking about chemistry in the real world, where government policy is as much a part of the conversation as molecular interaction.
Chemistry in a volatile world
Licence believes that resilient chemistry is vital because of the nature of world politics. He says we need ‘chemistry which can still deliver even in a volatile environment’.
‘Volatile environment’ is a term that embraces a multitude of potential disruptions. Licence outlines problems ‘where supply chains, and marketplaces, can be perturbed, damaged and disrupted’ as we saw during the pandemic, and other issues such as climate change, conflict and what appear to be increasingly prevalent political vagaries.
Licence points to the dramatic growth of some chemical production processes through the nineties, noughties and tens, where relatively unbridled growth led to the over-extension of some parts of the processes and geographically distributed supply line, thus exposing fragilities in the systems. Coupled with profound external events such as COVID, the need to build a more robust set of processes that are truly interlinked comes sharply into focus. In short, the need to develop resilient chemistry has significantly accelerated in the last decade. Licence sees the bigger picture as: ‘Sustainable chemistry turns [green chemistry] into an impactful process, and resilient chemistry being [sustainable chemistry] that can stand the test of time, rolling with the punches and continuing to deliver.’
Licence points to the increasing importance of intellectual property (IP) in chemistry as part of the resilient chemistry movement. In generic production, the high-cost economic west is losing out to lower-cost emerging markets. As a result, Licence considers that western nations are moving to innovative chemistries amenable to IP protection, where research creativity, not low costs, are decisive. Also, the shift of production to new locations risks making supply chains more fragile – trade wars, or a blockade of shipping bottlenecks such as the Suez Canal or Malacca Strait, could disrupt producers in Europe. Resilient chemistry must factor this in.
Licence would love politicians to contribute to the debate. Not easy. In countries that we consider to be fully democratic, there’s a tendency for some to assume that an informed, educated electorate would lead to a government that would then make equally informed and educated decisions. Of course, this isn’t necessarily true and, as Licence points out, the chemical industry is still struggling with public perception. There’s still a huge problem with people only associating the word ‘chemicals’ with bad things, and not with the value and impact that they deliver to our daily lives. Licence says: ‘If you walked on the street saying: “I’m made of chemicals”, people would walk away from you. They’d think you’re a freak. But they don’t have a problem with recognising that the human body is about 60% water. People don’t have a problem with that molecule – a chemical absolutely necessary for life.’ As he points out, there are deep-seated inequalities as identified with so-called ‘fence-line’ communities where property values are demonstrably lower than comparable areas that are not positioned next to chemical plants. Not only is the economic impact felt by residents in these communities, but these are the same communities that tolerate environmental compromises and, by virtue of proximity, are the first to feel the consequences of unintended impacts on local infrastructure – and indeed air and water quality. The thinking must change from the idea that molecules are delivering damage and harm to where an understanding of the intrinsic value and impact that these molecules bring to our society as a whole supersedes the negative.
In that light, Licence has found that there can be some simple ways to help change the narrative – for example, just by avoiding ‘the C word’ (chemicals) and replacing it with ‘molecules’ or ‘materials’. Licence explains: ‘If you say that you’re a molecular designer or a molecular architect, people go: “What’s that? Tell me more.” If you say to somebody: “I work with molecules”, instantly they think of these amazing ball-and-stick models that we used to use in school, and they see them as the sort of thing that delivers impact and function. But the minute you say “chemical”, it’s like: “Oh, oh, oh, oh. I can’t use chemicals.” It’s a provocative word.’
The role of the public, and therefore by extension the role of government, highlights the need for there to be a larger tent under which those people involved with resilient chemistry can gather. Educators, patent lawyers and accountants all have crucial roles to play in the resilient chemistry movement, and collaboration is vital. For example, chemical education is going to need to put sustainability at the forefront of considering chemical processes rather than at the end, when chemists might be saying: ‘How do we now clean up the mess that we’ve made?’ Surely better not to make the mess in the first place?
The need for a broader view of chemistry
Licence is keen to see a shift to research and innovation being geared to the specific function of molecules, rather than chemists producing molecules for the sake of it and then asking: ‘What can we use this for?’ Uses are often found, but they overlook multiple unintended impacts that the same molecule has on biology and ecology. The unintended consequences can hopefully be reduced in number by a more targeted approach to design, right at the outset, and by sustainable chemistry being a part of the initial thinking. Licence explains the philosophy needed at the end of a molecule’s useful life: ‘When molecules finish delivering the function, we can degrade them, we can disassemble them so that we can recycle the building blocks and use them again to deliver the sort of circular dream that everybody talks about but traditionally has been difficult to achieve.’ He points to the pharmaceutical industry, which, while far from perfect, is delivering drug design as a good example of impact specificity. The molecules used for drug therapy are often highly specific in their function and are typically developed to solve a clearly identified problem. There are lessons in there for the rest of the chemical industry. He’s also keen to emphasise that this doesn’t mean that the pure acquisition of knowledge isn’t necessary – it is – but it’s the targeting of specific parts of that knowledge that can lead the resilient chemistry revolution.
The real frustration for Licence is this. Since the green chemistry revolution there have been literally thousands and thousands of papers written with tremendous insight into what we can do to make strides in the field. However, the money-making machine that sits around the chemical industry isn’t implementing much of that knowledge. That comes back to a multigenerational reliance on oil and the fact that so many of the molecules that are in use today can be traced back to a barrel of crude. As long as that remains the case, there are all kinds of barriers to overcoming the inertia around the chemical industry. Licence says that there are bright spots including the use of bionaphtha, which has the potential to disrupt the oil dependence cycle, but there’s a colossal amount of work still to be done.
I conclude my conversation with Licence with him introducing the idea that he calls atomic stewardship, a concept vital to the success of resilient chemistry. The thinking centres around the understanding that the atoms of all elements have intrinsic value and need to be viewed in a similar light. As an example, Licence points to his gold wedding ring. Those atoms have been assigned a certain (relatively high) value by society that doesn’t change much – in fact, it typically appreciates with time! Ironically, despite their high-value assignment, those atoms aren’t doing any work – they aren’t making any impact. Compare them to the carbon atoms that we take from oil that are having a huge impact every day, quite strangely society doesn’t easily recognise the consolidated value of carbon embedded in the multiple thousands of small molecules that the chemicals industry produces! In fact, we seem to be complicit in society’s drive to casually allow these precious molecules to be converted to CO2 that we simply allow to escape into the atmosphere.
Resilient chemistry requires a new mindset where atoms of all of the elements are considered to offer value to society as a whole, and their lifespans need to be considered way beyond their initial impact.
Rebecca Blundell, IP Director and Patent Attorney at Mewburn Ellis, comments:
“Green chemistry luminary Pete Licence provides compelling insights into the emerging field of resilient chemistry. Inviting us to rethink how we design and deploy chemical processes and products to provide sustainable, adaptable and agile solutions that can brace challenges such as climate change, resource scarcity and supply chain instability. The sheer scope for innovation is immense, and it’s exciting to see the developments and collaborations that will inevitably arise from a field that is ripe with opportunities!”
Written by Adrian Dingle
