Shaping the Future of Green Chemistry: A Fraunhofer Initiative

Abstract

Dear readers,

“Chemistry does not deserve its bad reputation!” – as the Swiss protein researcher and Nobel Prize winner Kurt Wüthrich put it in 2019, and indeed: the general public still has many negative associations with the topic of chemistry. Yet there is no doubt that chemistry is indispensable for a large number of industrial value chains and is one of the most important drivers of new product developments and innovations in a wide range of economic sectors. And yet: despite all past successes in terms of significant reductions in emissions, energy and resource consumption, the demands for a green, sustainable and efficient chemical industry are experiencing a new dynamic, despite the fact that the chemical industry has long been facing up to the challenging objectives of defossilising its production processes, establishing a circular materials and energy economy and achieving greenhouse gas neutrality.

It is also becoming increasingly clear that the promotion of green, efficient and sustainable chemistry is also worthwhile for economic and competitive reasons. The demand from the processing industry for green processes and primary products (»sustainable supply chain«) is constantly increasing and competitive advantages can be realised more and more easily by increasing efficiency or tapping into sustainable sources of raw materials and energy.

Providing targeted support for this new “green chemistry” dynamic with new research and development contributions is the central mission that nine Fraunhofer Institutes have been pursuing for three years now in a joint, interdisciplinary lighthouse project. Under the title “Shaping the Future of Green Chemistry by Process Intensification and Digitalisation (ShaPID)”, the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft is conducting independent applied preliminary research to show ways in which sustainable, green chemistry can succeed through practical technological innovations. The range of example processes is extremely broad. How do we get from CO₂ and biogenic raw material sources to new polymers? How can we successfully synthesise important monomer building blocks from non-fossil raw materials in an energy-efficient way? Or how can highly reactive species be utilised for the atom-efficient production of precursors? In the ShaPID lighthouse project, complementary technologies from various areas of synthesis, reaction and catalysis technology, electrochemistry, continuous process and process engineering, modelling, simulation and process optimisation as well as digitalisation and automation are being brought together in a suitable way. We are convinced that this interdisciplinarity is the key to achieving the necessary technological maturity of new green chemical processes. This also requires suitable “green metrics” concepts and tools in order to be able to describe the “greenness” of chemical processes as objectively, qualitatively and quantitatively as possible during development.