Summary
This paper deals with The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) and the way with which sustainable chemistry could contribute to.
The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) have exceptional value in identifying key areas of challenge that need urgent improvement in order to move away from the unsustainable trajectory. According to authors, a major shortcoming of these goals is that they take a highly integrated and inextricably linked system, and express them as individual areas such as food, water, poverty, materials, empowerment, etc. Thus, in the absence of systems thinking, there is an excellent chance of noble intentions bringing about unintended and perhaps counter-productive consequences.
The authors provide a brief discussion on the definitions of both “Green Chemistry” and “Sustainable Chemistry”.
Moreover, the authors claim that there are many aspects to sustainable chemistry. These aspects should enable and empower the conduct and impact of the chemistry of sustainability. This requires an ecosystem of economics, policy, interdisciplinary engagement, equity, education, regulation, metrics, and awareness. For example, most of the legal requirements placed on a chemical product in the market, if they exist, are focused on the final molecule. There is little focus on the life-cycle of the product and the origins of its feedstocks, or the way it is transformed. If the ability of a product to be legally sold were tied to whether it was sustainably produced, this has the potential to shift the investment profile for some of the largest chemical manufacturing processes.
The authors suggest that Sustainable chemistry needs to explicitly increase the diversity of those involved in the chemical enterprise because diversity begets resilience and homogeneity begets vulnerability. At a minimum, some unquantifiable part of the dilemma of traditional chemistry has come from the reinforcing echo brought about by the same voices representing a narrow slice of world of talent and wisdom that needs to be part of the solution.
Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
This papers deals with sustainability and system thinking. It promotes system thinking as support that is not only necessary in our design of our chemical technologies, but that it’s also essential in terms of our investment strategies if we are going to move to a world of sustainable products, processes, and systems.
