Has your local coffee shop recently switched to biodegradable cups? Or maybe your workplace canteen has made the switch to biodegradable cutlery? Perhaps the plastic packaging of your favourite magazine is now a biodegradable wrapper? You might wonder what materials are behind these biodegradable products, and exactly how much better they are for the environment than the materials they’ve replaced. Here, we explore these biodegradable plastics, and how they stack up against conventional ones.
The chemical industry accounts for about 10% of the world’s energy demand and 7% of its greenhouse gas emissions. This graphic in…
Green chemistry is a concept that crops up with increasing frequency; we’ve already discussed it here previously with reference to the Periodic Table’s ‘endangered’ elements, and the recycling rates of metal elements used in mobile phones. But what do we mean by ‘green chemistry’, and what’s required for chemistry to be considered ‘green’? That’s what this post, a collaboration with the University of Toronto’s Green Chemistry Initiative, aims to look at.
