Each day, headlines warn that baby bottles are leaching dangerous chemicals, nonstick pans are causing infertility, and plastic containers are making us fat. What if green chemistry could change all that? What if rather than toxics, our economy ran on harmless, environmentally-friendly materials?
Elizabeth Grossman, an acclaimed journalist who brought national attention to the contaminants hidden in computers and other high tech electronics, now tackles the hazards of ordinary consumer products. She shows that for the sake of convenience, efficiency, and short-term safety, we have created synthetic chemicals that fundamentally change, at a molecular level, the way our bodies work. The consequences range from diabetes to cancer, reproductive and neurological disorders.
Yet it's hard to imagine life without the creature comforts current materials provide'and Grossman argues we do not have to. A scientific revolution is introducing products that are “benign by design,a developing manufacturing processes that consider health impacts at every stage, and is creating new compounds that mimic rather than disrupt natural systems. Through interviews with leading researchers, Grossman gives us a first look at this radical transformation.
Green chemistry is just getting underway, but it offers hope that we can indeed create products that benefit health, the environment, and industry.
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One: There's Something in the Air
Chapter Two: Swimmers, Hoppers, and Fliers
Chapter Three: Laboratory Curiosities and Chemical Unknowns
Chapter Four: The Polycarbonate Problem
Chapter Five: Plasticizers: Health Risks for Fifty Years of Denial of Data?
Chapter Six: The Persistent and Pernicious
Chapter Seven: Out of the Frying Pan
Chapter Eight: Nanotechnology: Perils and Promise of the Infinitesimal
Chapter Nine: Material Consequences: Toward a Greening of Chemistry
Epilogue: Redesigning the Future
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
About the Author
"Grossman profiles the worst offenders, including bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates, but she also portrays the good guys who are coming to the rescue, John Warner and Paul Anastas, founders of the burgeoning green chemistry movement. Green chemistry aims to replace hazardous synthetic chemicals with chemicals that are 'benign by design.' Grossman's clarion expose should give this lifesaving initiative a big boost."
