How to temper the urge to make projects succeed at the expense of sustainability? It’s all in the name, suggests Matthew Partridge.
Any new research project is usually founded on the best intentions and planning to achieve whatever exciting research goal agreed. Proposed routes, methods and work packages are set out to aim for success with pragmatism and best practice. About 30 seconds after the start of the project this balance is abandoned when someone says something like, “Wait, is this even going to work?” and everyone collectively panics and starts trying literally anything they can to save the venture. Pragmatism and best practice are replaced by their much less reliable siblings, panic and best guess.
The question of how sustainable is the project (or its results) is often something that is only considered around the same time as the end-of-project finger buffet and glossed over because someone’s just spotted a tray of little pink cakes.
A real world example of this is one project where a new chemical synthesis was developed to allow for the production of hitherto impossible compounds. The plan was a great success with a small five-litre hitch in the form of some nasty waste products. The synthesis worked great when you ran it small scale, but the scaled version resulted in a small ecological disaster per gram. Which everyone, with the exception of oil executives, would classify as not sustainable. You’ll be glad to hear that scaled up version was not put into production, but less pleased that, for a while, the scaled-down version was being done on an industrial scale with several hundreds of people scraping bits of filter paper into little vials.
The question of how sustainable is the project (or its results) is often something that is only considered around the same time as the end-of-project finger buffet and glossed over because someone’s just spotted a tray of little pink cakes.
But this is an extreme example, often the pressures against sustainable research are smaller. For example, what if you’ve just finished a long complex process but your purity is rubbish, but luckily there’s a simple method in the literature where you wash it with 50ml of this solvent.
If you don’t use that method, you’re going to have to come up with a brand new wash method or possibly start the whole process again and engineer out the purity loss... oh and you’ve got a meeting tomorrow where you need to demonstrate results. Oddly enough people tend to wash with the solvent and move on to the next issue.
It’s honestly a hard choice and a choice (or one like it) chemists face constantly where sustainability comes at the cost of easy gains.
There are countless webinars, articles and books about overcoming this but I think none come close to the cute-environmental-death labelling system. This solution renames chemicals after their worst environmentally damaging effect, preferably on the cutest thing you can think of. So instead of standard chemical names like diphenadione, we use their environmental effect name; in this case, squirrel-murder-crystals. It’s more unwieldy but any chemist would think twice about using that solvent wash to increase their purity if they had to reach for the bottle of horrifying-baby-mutantsolvent. And I would probably look for alternative methods if my batch synthesis produced large amounts of aqueous-kitten-death.
You will be pleased to hear, in the spirit of sustainability, this article was written as the author trialled drinking the least coffee deforestationpollution- beans possible. It might have been harder to complete, but produced a 70% reduction in deforestation-pollution-beans per article, although the author was relabelled irritable-frowny-grump due to their impact on those around them.
Dr Matthew Partridge is a researcher, cartoonist and writer who runs the outreach blog errantscience.com
