week 3 assignments

* Post a comment on "Neptune's Medicine Chest"

Balazars artcle, Neptune's Medicine Chest, is a fluff piece written like some flowery Christopher Columbus biography.

Rather than seeing nature as having an inherent integrity of its own, corporations and many scientists operating within the institutionalized culture of an organization view it as a source of raw materials for the creation of manufactured commodities.

Pharmaceutical companies that develop a cancer drug from the environment can patent the drug and maintain sole ownership over its use for 20 years. A corporation that genetically alters a species, not only owns the result, but also the subsequent generations of that altered species.

Thus when the problem is seen as “to beat other diseases that are rapidly -- alarmingly -- developing resistance to everything in the world's antibiotic medicine chest” and the answer to that problem follows the same logic that created it, we do not generate an actual solution- a commodity is introduced to the market.

It is our economic and cultural overdependence on antibiotics that is creating more and more antibiotic resistant pathogens. The problem is not that “the terrestrial world has been scoured so thoroughly that science is running out of places to look and breakthroughs to count on,” it is that we are destroying the biodiversity of our planets and our bodies at an alarming rate.

The privatization of nature allows imperialistic-minded corporations to patent it for profit at the expense of the environment- on land or on sea.

* Post a review of one of the links below

On the Advancing Green Chemistry Website the organization maps out their vision through 'The Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry'. The principles outline a model for industrial manufacturing that envisions pure and clean water leaving factories and polluted sources being brought back to life.  However, the organizations principals are ill conceived because they do not address the intrinsic aspect of the ecological crisis that is the systemic crisis of capitalism. Indeed, we cannot analyze the global ecological crisis separately from the crisis in which it is embedded.

Advancing Green Chemistry advocates that, “Green chemistry gives your company strategic advantage by enabling you to design and differentiate products and processes by environment and health criteria, and capture top and bottom line profits throughout the value chain.”

However, it is necessary to reject the logic of profit maximization and a productivist orientation, which take no account of the limits of the environment. Given the state of the planet, it seems naïve to me to advocate a “green” logic without an anticapitalist framework. Instead it is necessary to critique institutionalized environmentalism and create alternative models of production, distribution and consumption instead of putting a green veneer on the current model.

If not, Advancing Green Chemistry and the like never fully identify the root problem(s) and instead end up being an instrument in the service of green capitalism.

Excerpt from http://advancinggreenchemistry.org/

The Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry*

.                 Prevention 
It is better to prevent waste than to treat or clean up waste after it has been created.

.                 Atom Economy
 Synthetic methods should be designed to maximize the incorporation of all materials used in the process into the final product.

.                 Less Hazardous Chemical Syntheses
 Wherever practicable, synthetic methods should be designed to use and generate substances that possess little or no toxicity to human health and the environment.

.                 Designing Safer Chemicals
 Chemical products should be designed to effect their desired function while minimizing their toxicity.

.                 Safer Solvents and Auxiliaries
 The use of auxiliary substances (e.g., solvents, separation agents, etc.) should be made unnecessary wherever possible and innocuous when used.

.                 Design for Energy Efficiency
 Energy requirements of chemical processes should be recognized for their environmental and economic impacts and should be minimized. If possible, synthetic methods should be conducted at ambient temperature and pressure.

.                 Use of Renewable Feedstocks
 A raw material or feedstock should be renewable rather than depleting whenever technically and economically practicable.

.                 Reduce Derivatives 
Unnecessary derivatization (use of blocking groups, protection/ deprotection, temporary modification of physical/chemical processes) should be minimized or avoided if possible, because such steps require additional reagents and can generate waste.

.                 Catalysis
 Catalytic reagents (as selective as possible) are superior to stoichiometric reagents.

.                 Design for Degradation
 Chemical products should be designed so that at the end of their function they break down into innocuous degradation products and do not persist in the environment.

.                 Real-time analysis for Pollution Prevention
 Analytical methodologies need to be further developed to allow for real-time, in-process monitoring and control prior to the formation of hazardous substances.

.                 Inherently Safer Chemistry for Accident Prevention
 Substances and the form of a substance used in a chemical process should be chosen to minimize the potential for chemical accidents, including releases, explosions, and fires.

- See more at: http://advancinggreenchemistry.org/green-chem-101/what-is-gc/#sthash.fQy7GFyj