Early Industrial Roots of Green Chemistry
Mark A. Murphy
Abstract
Abstract Many literature articles, conventional histories, and narratives about the origins of “Green Chemistry” describe it as being a result of concepts and actions at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and/or research in Academia during the 1990s and later. But many examples of increasingly environmentally friendly real-world chemical processes were invented, developed, and commercialized in the oil refining, commodity chemical, and consumer product industries in many countries decades before the 1990s. The earliest efforts evolved and accelerated into many environmentally-oriented and commercialized industrial examples of “Pollution Prevention” during the 1970s and 1980s. The “Green Chemistry” terminology and “Principles” adopted by the EPA and Academia in the 1990s evolved from and re-named the mostly industrial “Pollution Prevention” approaches and inventions.