Reflections on “green chemistry” in 2005

On December 11–13 2005, the Royal Society of Chemistry held an international conference at Robinson College, Cambridge, to discuss the role of catalysis and biocatalysis in green chemistry. Almost at the same time, various sections of PACIFICHEM 2005 were dealing with related topics on the other side of the globe in Hawaii. These events marked a successful final for a large number of highly stimulating symposia featuring green chemistry topics last year all around the world. This prompted me to look back on 2005 and to reflect a little bit on the development of the journal and the field in that year. (The fact that I was co-chairing the meeting in freezing Cambridge and envied my colleagues in sunny Waikiki had of course nothing to do with this!).

From the many things that happened in the context of green chemistry in 2005, two things were most vivid in my recollections. In early summer, the latest impact factors for scientific journals were published and Green Chemistry achieved the remarkable value of 3.50. I have to admit that this exceeded even my most optimistic expectations! This index puts Green Chemistry among the most widely cited chemistry journals and shows that it covers a highly topical field at a very high scientific standard. This extraordinary success reflects the enthusiasm and activity of a fast growing scientific community and is a stimulation to further increase our efforts to ensure the best service to our authors and readers.

The second unexpected news came with the announcement of 2005's Nobel Prize. Of course, it was already anticipated for a while within the chemical community that the contributions of Yves Chauvin, Bob Grubbs, and Richard Schrock to the development of olefin metathesis as an inevitable tool in modern synthetic chemistry would be recognized in Stockholm. It was, however, a very positive surprise to see that the potential of their fundamental achievements for application in green chemistry was mentioned explicitly as part of the motivation for the committee's decision (http://nobelprize.org/chemistry/laureates/2005/press.html).

So, does this mean we are all set? The field is flourishing, it is recognized as an important part of chemistry, and now the journal just needs to harvest the fruits of the research that is going on all around the world? Well, I guess things are not yet that simple. There are still two extreme positions which I often encounter in discussion with colleagues and between which the journal has to continuously adjust its position. One would be that all chemical progress is a priori “green” because it will somehow improve chemical processes and thus we do not need to worry about green chemistry in the first place. Although it would be nice if this was the case, the past and present environmental disasters arising from chemical production show that we can unfortunately “improve” processes pretty much in the wrong direction. The other argument is that there might be a tendency for more routine chemistry to label itself “green” in order to be recognized as good science. The only answer to such a dangerous trend is to continuously apply the highest possible standards in all areas of green chemistry such as research proposals and projects, teaching exercises, conferences and of course publications.

With these brief reflections, I hope that all Green Chemistry staff, board members, authors, reviewers and readers had a terrific start to 2006, and that we will all have fun continuing this scientific success story further!

Walter Leitner

RWTH-Aachen, Germany

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