14 DAY TRIAL // The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the United States has recently announced the winners of this year's Green Chemistry Awards.
Granted, the eco-friendly technologies that were honored by the Agency earlier this week are not nearly as famous as the folks who will win the Oscars in next year's March, but they are quite popular among greenheads.
Not to mention the fact that they have the potential to help human society put a leash on climate change and global warming, and promote sustainability.
Not to beat about the bush, the five winners of this year's Green Chemistry Awards are a coolant made from soybean oil, an eco-friendly white paint, a new type of leather described as vegan, a new technology that makes the practice of manufacturing chemicals for genetic testing less wasteful and a less-toxic form of chrome plating.
Environmental Health News explains that Cargill, Inc.'s soybean-oil-based coolant is a substitute for the petroleum-based ones currently used as coolants in electrical transformers.
Unlike petroleum-based oils, the one Cargill, Inc. rolled out using soybean-oil as raw material is said to be carbon neutral, non-toxic and non-hazardous.
The technology hit the market back in 1998, and has since come to be used by over 500,000 transformers up and running across the Unites States.
Dow Chemical Co. managed to snatch a Green Chemistry Award by rolling out a new technology that reduces the ecological footprint of the process of manufacturing white pigments for paint.
Specifically, the technology developed by this company is said to cut energy and water use, and even curb pollutants emissions. With the help of this new technology, energy use, water requirements and pollutants emissions are reduced by 22%, 30% and 24%, respectively.
The vegan leather honored by EPA was developed by a chemical engineer professor at the University of Delaware, i.e. Richard Wool, and is made from bio-based materials. The professor is now working with several athletic shoe companies to market it.
Life Technologies Corp also won an award for developing a better and less-wasteful method to roll out manufacture chemicals used by the genetic testing industry.
The company's eco-friendly technology cuts the use of solvent by 95%, and has helped the manufacturing plant owned and operated by Life Technologies Corp to reduce its yearly hazardous waste output by as much as 1.5 million pounds (0.68 million kilograms).
Lastly, Faraday Technology, Inc. owes its Green Chemistry Award to its having developed a less-toxic form of chrome plating. Chrome plating serves to manufacture things such as airplane components and implies the use of hexavalent chromium, i.e. a chemical compound known to be a dangerous carcinogen.
It is this compound that said company has managed to replace with trivalent chromium, which is both less toxic and non-carcinogenic.
According to Martin Mulvihill, the executive director of the University of California's Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry, products and technologies that won the 2013 Green Chemistry Awards all “represent concrete improvements in reducing the environmental impacts of the chemicals industry.”