This article was originally featured on the ACS Green Chemistry Institute's The Nexus blog.
Explore this year’s Green Chemistry Challenge Award (GCCA) winners, and join us in celebrating the creative solutions and sustainable practices they are contributing to the chemical enterprise.
The annual GCCAs showcase the most innovative achievements in green chemistry. This prestigious recognition acknowledges advancements in the incorporation of green chemistry and engineering into chemical design, manufacturing, and use.
The GCCAs have been a joint initiative by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention and the American Chemical Society's Green Chemistry Institute (ACS GCI) for nearly 30 years. The program's evolution and maturation demonstrate significant progress toward implementing environmentally conscious practices across the chemical industry.
This year’s awards ceremony and reception took place on September 26 in conjunction with Climate Week NYC, raising awareness of the importance of chemistry in addressing global sustainability challenges. The program featured remarks from senior leaders including awards ceremony moderator Jeff Kohn (EPA, Chief, Pollution Prevention Grants Branch), Adelina Voutchkova (ACS, Director, Sustainable Development), LaTrease Garrison (ACS, Chief Operating Officer), Anahita Williamson (EPA, Director, Sustainability, Prevention, and Right-to-Know Division), Jennie Romer (EPA, Deputy Assistant Administrator for Pollution Prevention), and Keynote speaker Dr. Meredith Williams (California EPA, Director of the California Department of Toxic Substances Control).
We’re excited to share the stories of this year’s five innovative winners below!
The application deadline for the 2025 Green Chemistry Challenge Awards is December 13, 2024. An informational webinar will be hosted by the U.S. EPA on October 9. Learn more here.
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Academic Category Winner
University of Delaware, Professor Dionisios G. Vlachos: Renewable Lubricant Base Oils
The lubricant market is valued at about $60 billion, and lubricants are used in many applications ranging from industrial machinery to everyday vehicles. Lubricant base oils—which are conventionally made from petroleum feedstocks—make up 75-90% of commercially formulated lubricants. Professor Dionisios G. Vlachos at the University of Delaware was awarded the Academic Category prize for developing new synthetic methods to produce lubricant base oils using biobased feedstocks, such as plants or food waste.
Through the use of a heterogeneous (i.e. solid) catalyst, the new process also reduces the use of hazardous reagents, including corrosive acids, compared to existing bio-based lubricant production. Professor Vlachos’s team has developed three classes of bio-lubricant base oils with different properties, providing comparable or better performance to existing technologies.
Learn more about Professor Vlachos’s research at the University of Delaware.
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Small Business Category Winner
Viridis Chemical Company: Dehydrogenation of Bio-Ethanol to Ethyl Acetate and Green Hydrogen Technology
Viridis Chemical Company is the 2024 Small Business Category winner, recognized for developing a greener synthetic method and more circular process design. The company’s method for producing ethyl acetate from corn bioethanol provides a renewable, drop-in replacement for its traditionally fossil-derived counterpart. Rather than using chemicals acquired from processing coal or natural gas, Viridis’s reaction uses a solid-state catalyst.
In addition to providing a renewables-based route to a common chemical, their catalyst is reusable, and hydrogen gas from the dehydration of bioethanol supplies about 40% of the manufacturing facility’s energy requirements.
The new process meaningfully reduces environmental impacts compared to the traditional esterification and direct addition routes, scoring better than both methods in most environmental impact categories.
Learn more about Viridis Chemical Company.
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Greener Synthetic Pathways Category Winner
Merck & Co., Inc: Breaking Barriers in Sustainable Manufacturing of Biologics: The Innovation of a Continuous Manufacturing Automated Process for Keytruda®
This year’s award marks Merck & Co., Inc.’s 10th GCCA, demonstrating continued leadership in the development and implementation of greener chemistries. This year, Merck is being recognized with the Greener Synthetic Pathways award for a new synthetic process to make Keytruda® (pembrolizumab) which reduces energy consumption by about 4.5-fold, water use by 4-fold, raw material usage by about 2-fold, and physical space needed by about 50%.
Pembrolizumab is a monoclonal antibody, a type of protein molecule produced by living cells. Typically, these types of proteins are produced in batches from cells engineered to produce the desired antibody. Cells are placed in a large vessel and allowed to grow for several weeks. The cells and other impurities are then filtered away, leaving the desired protein product.
The new “continuous process” allows the protein to be filtered away from the cells continuously instead of requiring filtration at the end of each batch. The continuous process can produce substantially more pembrolizumab per reactor volume, which allows Merck to use smaller equipment, shrinking the facility’s physical footprint. In addition, it eliminates the need for water-intensive cleaning and sterilization of stainless steel reactors and the smaller process volume reduces consumables, such as plastic bags, needed for intermediate steps.
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Design of Safer and Degradable Chemicals Category Winner
Pro Farm Group, a Subsidiary of Bioceres Crop Solutions, RinoTec®: A Microbial Insecticidal and Nematicidal Seed Treatment
This year’s Design of Safer and Degradable Chemicals category winner is Pro Farm Group, which was recognized for a biodegradable microbial pesticide, RinoTec®, that is safer for humans and the environment compared to many traditional synthetic pesticides. By engineering a fermentation to produce more of the natural pesticide compound, Pro Farm Group innovated a way to reduce the amount needed to be effective while offering their product at a competitive price. The microbe is grown in large vessels, then killed and incorporated into a seed treatment package that coats seeds prior to planting staple crops including corn, cotton, soy, and wheat.
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Climate Change Category Winner
PhoSul®: An Organically Enhanced Rock Phosphate Fertilizer
PhoSul® is the 2024 GCCA winner in the Climate Change category. The production of traditional phosphate fertilizers comes with numerous environmental challenges, including the processing of phosphorous-containing rock using strong acids, the production of hazardous gypsum waste containing heavy metals and radioactive material, and the release of fluorine into the atmosphere.
PhoSul® has developed a method for using phosphate rock directly that not only avoids the need for acid processing and the associated wastes, but also demonstrates improved performance compared to existing phosphate rock fertilizers. The new fertilizer consists of spherical granules of phosphate rock combined with other materials that improve phosphate availability for plants. The additional materials allow the tricalcium phosphate in the phosphate rock, which is not available to plants, to be converted into available forms in the soil.
In addition to its other benefits, PhoSul® minimizes phosphate leaching in the field, eliminating phosphate runoff and its associated ecological damage.
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Image credit: Next Level Photo Video.
