This grant supports a workshop to be held in Arlington, VA in January 2012 on Sustainable Chemistry. The workshop aims to identify key areas where fundamental research in the core disciplines (Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering) is needed to advance the goal of increasing the sustainability of chemical processing and manufacturing. This is expected to include strategies to reduce or eliminate the use of rare elements and other scarce materials, reduce the use of freshwater and energy, and increase the feasibility of recovery/recycling.
The workshop will explore multidisciplinary approaches and articulate the need for a systems-level view of sustainability, including science, technology, economics and societal impact. This is likely to require new educational approaches to train the next generation of researchers to incorporate such thinking into their research design. The added value created by funding research efforts that incorporate investigators with different perspectives and from different disciplines will be apparent. The broad recommendations to the scientific community as well as specific examples will be incorporated into a widely available report.
The Sustainable Chemistry, Engineering and Materials (SusChEM) workshop was held in Arlington, VA, on January 17-19, 2012. The workshop brought together chemists, chemical engineers, materials scientists and materials engineers, to identify research challenges and chart possible courses to increase the sustainability of key chemical and materials manufacturing sectors which are critical to the US economy. Workshop participants also included economists and educational innovators. Participants were drawn from academia, national laboratories, industry/private sector, and government/federal agencies (including the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, Office of Naval Research, EPA, AAAS, ACS). The workshop included presentations of research directions, challenges, and opportunities by participants in the form of keynote oral presentations and short "concept" presentations, supplemented by overview presentations by the co-chairs and the NSF division directors; discussion and distillation of the material in the form of smaller "break-out" groups; and, report back from the break-out groups and general discussion. Major discussion areas included (1) improved sourcing of materials; (2) substitution of critical materials; (3) strategies and technologies for extraction; and (4) process efficiency. The workshop findings emphasize the importance of defining metrics for assessing sustainability, the need for multi- and/or inter-disciplinary collaboration, and new training models involving curricular innovations, student engagement, and experiential learning.
