12 PRINCIPLES OF GREEN CHEMISTRY
1. Prevention: It is better to prevent waste than to treat or clean up waste after it has been created.
2. Atom Economy: Synthetic methods should be designed to maximize the incorporation of all materials used in the process into the final product.
3. 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.
4. Designing Safer Chemicals: Chemical products should be designed to affect their desired function while minimizing their toxicity.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Use of Renewable Feedstocks: A raw material or feedstock should be renewable rather than depleting whenever technically and economically practicable.
8. 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.
9. Catalysis: Catalytic reagents (as selective as possible) are superior to stoichiometric reagents.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
Solutions For A More Sustainable Future
We make a measurable difference by minimizing our effects on the environment. And we increase that difference dramatically by making hundreds of products that allow businesses to minimize their impact as well.
With ArroShield® EVO, we are developing the next generation of solutions, but we never stop innovating. We’re always developing new ways to help customers meet their environmental challenges, along with ways to reduce our products’ environmental impact. For example, our laboratories are identifying and promoting the use of renewable and recycled materials as replacements for petroleum-based polymers, monomers, and virgin raw materials. Our innovative research will make our products more environmentally sustainable and will help ensure a more cost-effective source of raw materials as oil becomes scarcer.
Our sustainable leadership not only applies to the products we develop and manufacture, but it also applies to our own facilities. We are always developing new ways to reduce our internal energy usage from all our activities, in part through implementing employee-inspired projects at all our facilities. We continue to adopt new methods of improving energy efficiency and raising the importance of energy efficiency throughout our company. Consuming energy generated by fossil fuels creates GHG’s, so we’ve worked hard to use less energy.
Goals Are Great. Results Are What Matter.
We have already reached many milestones in our quest toward greater sustainability. We continually monitor the progress of each of our goals. Our entire team is continually challenged to progress toward our goals.
In some of our environmental goals, we have exceeded our expectations, in others, we are not quite there. By continually evaluating our progress, we are able to make constant changes and corrections to meet our overall objectives.
At the end of each year we evaluate our performance versus our goals for that year and measure all the parameters that we set as goals at the beginning of the year. Every year we will perform the same process in order to ensure that our goals are always in our focus. Through this process we will ensure that our sustainability goals are met and perhaps exceeded. You see, our goals are a minimum requirement for our company; exceeding all of our Sustainability Goals is our real passion.
Managing Waste
Minimizing waste is important in every phase of our operations. We look in every nook and cranny of our operations, from the waste in offices, to waste in printing e-mails, to the waste in throwing away recyclables. We minimize the waste from the raw materials that are used to make our final products. Since those raw materials are expensive, reducing waste is important environmentally and economically.
In 2012, we set an aggressive goal for waste reduction. This definition included materials that we send outside of ArrowStar to be recycled as waste, as well as waste we generated internally and could not recycle. While we have always promoted recycling, the new definition was established to find ways to prevent the generation of waste in the first place.
One of our most ambitious waste reduction strategies is the ability to make every batch of synthesized product to specifications every time, all the time, the first time.
This new way of looking at waste helped us to increase our focus on pollution prevention, design changes in products, and process. We have made tremendous progress over the past year with this new focus. In the past 12 months, we have made 99% of our chemical batches meet specifications the first time. This has been a tremendous accomplishment of which we are very proud.
Another recycling endeavor which has been extremely rewarding is our tote recycling effort. In January 2012, we installed high pressure equipment to wash out used totes allowing them to be filled with product again and reused. This investment has enabled us to recycle greater than 60% of the totes that are used to ship our products.
So if you receive a tote from us that looks like it might have been used once before, you are correct and we are very proud that you noticed. As a footnote, all recycled totes will carry a certified sticker from ArrowStar® that they are suitable for reuse.