Environmental challenges facing the chemical industry

Catalysis and process research have a tremendous opportunity to improve our environment. New catalytic processes can clean up the contaminated soil and water in existing plants, manufacture chemicals with minimal exposure to hazardous materials, and essentially eliminate waste. This paper will briefly discuss six areas, currently under exploration at DuPont which illustrate this potential. These include: 1) better catalytic processes which generate less waste because of higher yield; 2) conversion of waste byproducts to salable coproducts; 3) new processes for the production and consumption of hazardous materials; 4) a potential route for the oxidative desulfurization of petroleum fuels; 5) the development of environmentally safer products for replacing chlorofluorocarbons; 6) a potential biochemical process for the remediation of ground water contaminated with chlorocarbons.