Krótka historia kodyfikacji na rzecz chemii przyjaznej środowisku

Abstract

A Brief History of Codifications for Environmentally Friendly Chemistry Since the beginning of the 1990s, environmental protection has played an increasingly important role both in the chemical industry and in the scientific work of chemists in the academic world. A noteworthy feature of the so-called green chemistry and sustainable chemistry is the emphasis that practitioners of both disciplines lay on codifying the principles, rules, and characteristics that environmentally friendly chemical reactions and processes should meet. These codifications have a complicated epistemological status: they aim to set the criteria of ‘greenness’, indicate the direction of scientific development, and build the foundations for new research programs. While the most famous of these codifications are the twelve principles of green chemistry developed in the United States in 1998, successive attempts to codify a new type of environmentally friendly chemistry have been regularly made over the last twenty years – not only in the United States but also in Germany. Starting with American green chemistry, through German ‘soft chemistry’ (sanfte Chemie) and chemistry for sustainable development, and ending with circular chemistry, this article is an attempt to familiarize the Polish reader with this new tool in the work of researchers and engineers. Its purpose is to pay particular attention to the context of the creation and interpretation of consecutive sets of rules of a new type of chemistry and the challenges related to their application.