To be green and profitable

Abstract

In 2008, my boss, C&EN editor in chief Rudy Baum, asked me to write the opening story for a special issue of the magazine devoted to sustainability. My piece laid out the chemical industry’s argument that while the industry had caused a lot of society’s environmental problems, it was also the source of many of the solutions. Fifteen years later, we still have a lot of environmental problems. Plastic waste, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and chlorinated solvents are just a few products of the chemical industry that society is grappling with today. Yet, more so than 15 years ago, there’s general agreement that our world’s most overarching environmental problem is the buildup of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere. Global warming was on the radar back then, and it was a problem that industry executives said they could address. But today, it dominates public discussion of the environment like no