Every day, it seems, researchers find yet another harmful chemical in common consumer goods. As John Warner, PhD, put it: “Open up the newspaper, turn on the radio, look on the internet. We're inundated with ‘This red dye causes cancer. This plastic causes birth defects. This technology is promoting global climate change.’” Products that contain harmful substances are not in the interests of chemists, companies, the public, or product stewards. “Let's assume nobody wants to have a red dye that causes cancer,” Warner continued. “So, why do we do it?”

Warner, a chemist with more than 300 patents under his name, believes this state of affairs is not inevitable but a consequence of how chemistry is taught and how companies conduct product research and development (R&D). Academic programs may teach chemists how to make a substance red, how to make it stick to fabric, and how to prevent it from oxidizing in air, but not how to spot potential carcinogens. “Never did I have a class that taught me how to look at a molecule and anticipate its negative impact on humans or the environment. It's just not part of the discipline of chemistry,” Warner said. “It's a weird aberration in the way the field of chemistry has evolved that the only people who understand molecular structure receive no training on how to anticipate the negative impacts.”

According to Warner, everyone will benefit when the potential toxicity of chemicals is addressed early in the product development process. This requires the participation of product stewards in R&D.

Introducing “Green Chemistry”

Warner is one of the founders of green chemistry, a field that focuses on eliminating or reducing hazardous substances in products and processes. When Warner was a researcher at Polaroid in the 1990s, he came to a revelation about the imperative to ensure products are safe during the design phase, rather than identifying hazards and minimizing risk after the product has been manufactured or gone into use. Several of the technologies he developed for Polaroid went into wide-scale manufacturing—which first required them to pass evaluation under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). The uniqueness of some of Warner’s inventions meant that the Environmental Protection Agency wasn’t sure how to address them. “So I found myself in Washington, D.C. having deep philosophical discussions about the regulatory procedures of chemicals,” he said.

At about this time, Warner experienced a personal calamity. His two-year-old son passed away due to a birth defect.

Warner, grieving, no longer felt like a great scientist. “What if something I touched caused my son's birth defect?” he wondered. “What if something in the lab—that I even got an award for—caused this disease?”

However, “the answer to the question, ‘Did something I touch in the lab cause my son harm?’ wasn't as important to me as the fact that I couldn't answer,” Warner said. Although professionals such as doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses, and architects must maintain licenses to demonstrate they can practice safely, “there is no oversight in chemistry,” he pointed out. “So we got to hope that the chemists are trained well.” As long as chemists can’t anticipate the effects of the chemicals they work with, he realized, these effects will remain undetected until they harm people or the environment.

This revelation led Warner to co-write Green Chemistry: Principles and Practice with Paul Anastas, PhD, an old friend who then worked for EPA. First published in 1998, this book lays out the principles of the field of green chemistry, the first of which is “It is better to prevent waste than to treat or clean up waste after it has been created.” Other principles urge chemists to use non-toxic synthetic methods, limit solvents and other auxiliary substances, minimize energy requirements, and employ renewable materials or feedstocks whenever practicable.

Green Chemistry was very well-received and generated international renown for the co-authors, but Warner stressed that he and Anastas aren’t the only ones contributing to the field. “There are hundreds, maybe thousands of people that are doing amazing things in the field of green chemistry,” Warner said. “I get credit because my name is on a book, but this is a huge, huge movement with tons of amazing people.”

One group of professionals who can become involved in this growing field are product stewards.

Green Chemistry and Product Stewardship

The principles of green chemistry direct scientists and companies to design products and processes free of harmful substances from the start. If this is successful, product stewards will have less need to manage the effects of these substances when they are manufactured, used, and disposed of. According to Warner, this will present opportunities for product stewards to focus on other jobs they’re already equipped to do. One of these jobs may be participating in product design. Warner doesn’t envision product stewards developing chemical products themselves but rather consulting with chemists and their organizations.

“Every time someone wants to invent something, whether they're an academic lab or a corporate lab, someone in product stewardship should be explaining to them the real world,” he said. “If you address those issues when you're inventing, you can take care of a lot of them. But after the invention, after it's on the market, then it's all risk mitigation.”

“There's also an opportunity to do things that aren't dealing with design flaws,” Warner continued. He explained that if product stewards didn’t have to spend most of their time managing harmful substances, they might coordinate across supply chains, parts of their organizations, or even multiple organizations. Or they might focus their efforts on ensuring their organizations comply with chemical regulations in all the countries and regions they operate in. “Even if you've got a perfectly non-toxic, non-carbon-generating technology, there's still all kinds of social, economic, regional things to do from a product stewardship perspective,” he said. “Imagine if big stuff was taken care of just by intrinsic design.”

Ultimately, Warner believes that product stewards’ involvement in green chemistry will benefit organizations by reducing the costs incurred by managing harmful substances. “I would argue, when you improve the environmental performance, if it's done by reducing the intrinsic hazard in the first place, it always increases profits,” he said.

Green Chemistry at PSX

Warner plans to raise awareness of opportunities for product stewards in green chemistry through his opening keynote at PSX 2024, the annual conference of the Product Stewardship Society. One outcome of this session, he hopes, will be that participants return to their organizations and open lines of communication with their R&D departments. Collaboration “makes an amazing difference,” he said, “not only in the moral and ethical components, but these intangible psychological interactions within an organization.” He intends for product stewards to participate in the product development process, not police it.

His keynote will also cover practical tips. “I plan on sharing some examples of how using the principles of green chemistry to design a technology at its inception has led to success stories in the real world,” Warner said.

Finally, he’ll give participants a better understanding of green chemistry and how it will benefit their organizations. “Usually what happens is that people hear the word ‘green,’ they hear the word ‘chemistry,’ and they construct what they think it must mean,” Warner said. “I hope that they walk away and go, ‘I didn't realize that's what it is. Now I see how this fits within my organization, and I'm going to try to bring this to my organization.’”

John Warner will give the opening keynote at PSX on Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024, from 8 to 9:30 a.m. Mountain time. PSX 2024 will be held Oct. 15–17 in Denver, Colorado. To learn more about the keynote sessions, view the conference agenda, or register, visit the conference website.