Greener Industry: Products from Starch and Cellulose

As I researched further in the green industry site that I mentioned before, I came across several topics, one being about the production of items form starch and cellulose. These products are highly renewable because the starch comes from plants and the cellulose from wood pulp. Starch products include adhesives, paints, drug encapsulation, toothpaste, and wastewater treatment. Cellulose products include photo film, fabric fibres, and spectacle frames. I am highly interested in this topic because I believe that not only is it important to make new technologies to reduce our impact on the earth, but it is just as important to make recyclable, biodegradable, and renewable types of the products we use so often. For the customer, this is such an easy way to help save our world!

I visited these blogs:

Josh, Travis, Ryan, Eric

The blogs that I visited all seemed to display interest in ways that chemistry could save our earth. There was research about using chemistry to develop new technologies both more beneficial to us humans and our earth, research about planets (which is very useful considering we might need them someday for one reason or another), and studying exceptions to the rules in "quantum chemistry". In the real world, not all things follow the chemistry rules that we study in the classroom! It is great to know that chemists are doing things to improve our world and reduce our damage, and that they are studying other planets and their creation.

Green Chemistry

I think that using chemistry to create substances to use that aren't toxic to human health or the environment is very useful. The link that I found gives a lot of information on how current substances (or specific ingredients they're composed of) hurt the environment in different ways. I am really interested in the examples the website gives about how green chemistry is used to make substanes that serve the same purposes as their counterparts but are harmless to the environment. For example, there is a Belgian company that manufactures biodegradable household products from renewable sources. The website also offers a lot of info on better ways to reduce waste. Right now, chemists are reseaching types of solvents that could be used for waste, "investigating alternative reactions with higher yield or atom economy link to atom economy characteristic", and much more. They have even developed polymer-based carpets that can be recycled! In my opinion, preserving the earth is a great application for chemistry and I am very interested in further researching this topic.