This article was originally shared on The Nexus blog.
By Christiana Briddell, Communication Portfolio Manager, ACS Green Chemistry Institute
At the recent ACS Fall 2024 meeting held in August in Denver, Colorado, NSF’s Division of Chemistry and the ACS jointly hosted a symposium with leaders from government, industry, CAS, and ACS journal editors in academia to discuss the challenges and opportunities of advancing sustainable chemistry through data sharing, partnerships across sectors, and workforce development.
This joint session reflected the recognition that collaborative action among academia, industry, nonprofits, and federal agencies is essential to address the need for fundamental research leading to more sustainable materials and processes on a large scale. The foundations of collaboration have been laid—most recently through the Sustainable Chemistry Research & Development Act. Research funding in sustainable chemistry and collaborative projects is growing, with recent examples including the Safer Chemistry Impact Fund, Moore Foundation’s Green Chemistry Initiative, and the NSF’s Molecular Foundations for Sustainability: Sustainable Polymers Enabled by Emerging Data Analytics (MFS-SPEED), as well as ACS’s own Sustainability Grants through the ACS Campaign for a Sustainable Future.
Still, the scale of the challenge remains immense. As panelist John Warner commented, “Eighty-five percent of the technologies needed to address sustainability challenges haven’t been invented yet.” Preparing chemists with the toolset to fully incorporate design for sustainability in the same way chemists design for function is essential. The ACS has recognized this in their recent revision of the ACS Guidelines for Bachelor’s Degree Programs to include both green chemistry and systems thinking.
Sustainable solutions must also include the consumer perspective. Consumer demand for products that stem from sustainable technologies is high, but not at the expense of product function or price. Solutions brought to market have to demonstrate holistic improvements. Dianne Ripberger of PepsiCo recounted the infamous rollout of a new biodegradable chip bag in 2010 that consumers did not care for due to the excessive noise of the bag. Revenue plummeted, and the bag was pulled. A sustainable solution that consumers reject is not a sustainable solution after all.
The context has changed in the last twenty years: sustainability is no longer so niche, and industries now recognize more and more that they do not need to compete on the grounds of sustainability, but rather collaborate to raise the common tide. For example, according to Ripberger, PepsiCo has opened their patents on sustainability improvements.
To meet the challenge of the moment, one collaborative path forward discussed is to promote the sharing of experimental data by chemists. According to Ryan Jorn, program director of NSF’s Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) and Division of Chemistry (CHE), there is less engagement on data sharing in chemistry to-date than in other fields. However, in response to the 2022 Office of Science and Technology Memo, the NSF is requiring that publications and their supporting data resulting from federally funded research be made publicly available by the end of next year.
The value of sharing experimental data—even for failed experiments—is to better inform the chemistry community and support faster learning. How many times has one research repeated experiments that had been performed by others and not published? According to John Warner, another hidden value of data sharing is that other chemists may well come up with alternative interpretations to the same data. “Chemists don’t publish data; they publish the interpretation of data,” says Warner. In his experience as an inventor and entrepreneur, “Ninety-five percent of (new) technologies fail because of interpretation.”
Examples of data sharing highlighted by NSF include the Descriptor Libraries from the Molecular Sciences Software Institute (MolSSI) and Center for Computer Assisted Synthesis (C-CAS); datasets from the Molecular Maker Labs Institute; and the Center for the Chemistry of Molecularly Optimized Networks’ Community Resource for Informatic Polymer Technology (CRIPT).
Data sharing is not without significant challenges. Andrea Jacobs, assistant director of strategy, CAS, emphasized the importance of data quality in chemistry—not only for chemists, but also in considering the increased use of datasets for AI, where noisy data can cause a high degree of unpredictability in AI models. If more data is shared, a method to normalize, harmonize and ensure quality may be needed. Other issues around incentive structures, privacy, and security concerns were mentioned by the panelists.
Tackling these challenges and looking for opportunities to fuel chemistry innovation will be an ongoing discussion in the chemistry community, and one that both NSF and ACS have a vested interest in engaging the community to address.
