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Introduction to Green Chemistry

Green Chemistry is a wide-ranging philosophy that aims to minimize the impact of chemical products on the environment. This has historically focussed on minimizing the amount of waste generated by chemical reactions, but recent advances have moved the field toward diverse goals in benign solvent selection, catalysis, and minimizing energy usage. The field has spread to include many areas of environmental concern, including minimizing toxic waste production, introducing products made from renewable resources, and mitigating or preventing climate change. Because of the wide-ranging interests of the field, it has historically taken a multidisciplinary view of research, with contributions from scientists and engineers often intertwined.

The goals of Green Chemistry

• Minimize waste generation (rather than remediate waste)
• Use low toxicity materials
• Minimize fossil resource usage
• Minimize energy usage

Dr Jason Hallett

Jason Hallett completed his PhD in Chemical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2002, under the direction of Professors Charles Eckert and Charles Liotta. He took up a Marshall-Sherfield Postdoctoral Fellowship in Sustainable Chemistry in 2006 in the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College. He is now a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College. His current research interests involve the solvation behaviour of ionic liquids and the use of ionic liquids in biorefining, specifically the production of sustainable chemical feedstocks and lignocellulosic biofuels. He also works on multidisciplinary research projects across several production scales, from laboratory to pilot scale, involving bioprocessing.