Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Green Chemistry's Role in Resilience
Green Chemistry's Role in Resilience
Paul T. Anastas, Ph.D., ACS Green Chemistry Institute Julie Zimmerman, Ph.D., U.S. EPA U. Virginia
Designing Resilient, Sustainable Systems Environ. Sci. Technol., 37 (23), 5330 -5339, 2003.
Joseph Fiksel*
Traditional systems engineering practices try to anticipate and resist disruptions but may be vulnerable to unforeseen factors. An alternative is to design systems with inherent "resilience" by taking advantage of fundamental properties such as diversity, efficiency, adaptability, and cohesion.
Fundamental Properties
The complexity that results from systemsystem interactions outstrips our best highend computing capabilities and perhaps our human abilities of comprehension. Is there a reasonable approach that involves the design of fundamental properties of matter and energy that can play a role in resilience? Can this help to design for resilience?
Focus on Design
The moment a chemist puts pencil to paper, he/she is making choices about the human health and environmental impacts
Definition
GREEN CHEMISTRY: The design of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances.
O N N O O sedativum teratogenic H O
O OH
N H
contraceptive b-blocker
Risk
Risk = Hazard x Exposure
Green chemistry focuses primarily on reducing risk by reducing intrinsic hazard.
What is toxicology?
The traditional definition of toxicology is "the science of poisons." As our understanding of how various agents can cause harm to humans and other organisms, a more descriptive definition of toxicology is "the study of the adverse effects of chemicals or physical agents on living organisms".
Reversible or irreversible
Reversible effects are not permanent and can be changed or remedied.
Skin rash, nausea, eye irritation, dizziness, etc. Injury to the liver - can regenerate.
Irreversible effects are permanent and cannot be changed once they have occurred.
Injury to the nervous system is usually irreversible since its cells cannot divide and be replaced. Irreversible effects include birth defects, mutations, and cancer.
Dose-Response curve
Knowledge of the shape and slope of the dose-response curve is extremely important in predicting the toxicity of a substance at specific dose levels. Major differences among toxicants may exist not only in the point at which the threshold is reached but also in the percent of population responding per unit change in dose (i.e., the slope). As illustrated above, Toxicant A has a higher threshold but a steeper slope than Toxicant B.
Small prostate
Abnormal bladder
17
18
19
Interactions
Humans are normally exposed to several chemicals at one time. Examples are: hospital patients on the average receive 6 drugs daily home influenza treatment consists of aspirin, antihistamines, and cough syrup drinking water may contain small amounts of pesticides, heavy metals, solvents, and other organic chemicals air often contains mixtures of hundreds of chemicals such as automobile exhaust and cigarette smoke gasoline vapor at service stations is a mixture of 40-50 chemicals
Thoughts
What is the nature of synergism?
Thoughts
How does Persistence change the doseresponse relationship?
Thoughts
How to design around harmless chemicals activating genes in certain sub-populations?
Thoughts
How does one design resilience into a systems to understand and anticipate the intersection of mechanisms of action?
Thoughts
Susceptibility of system to penetration (GI tract curare, molecular chaperones, groundwater mobilization of metals, etc.)
Thoughts
Reliance of one system on another oxidations combustion atmospheric oceanic pH fisheries social structure
Thoughts
What effects will magnify with interactions with other systems?
Snail darters and PCBs
Thoughts
How do perturbations propagate?
bioaccumulation, endocrine disruption
Thoughts
What is the relationship between embedded or transformation energy and toxicity?