Greening chemistry: Emerging epistemic political tensions in California and the United States

Abstract

Green chemistry promises to make the global chemical industry more sustainable through redesigning chemical production. Nonetheless, many green chemists in the US have focused on persuading other chemists and industrial corporations to change through education and voluntary industry action. Green chemistry in the US may have stagnated relatively because of missing societal input and public scrutiny of chemistry choices. Using recent green chemistry policy experiments in California and the US, I explore how new epistemic political tensions over the roles of expertise, societal participation, and regulation may be creating new societal input and, perhaps, greater industry take-up. I consider whether the concept of socially robust knowledge can help illuminate California’s experiments more broadly, and find that this concept needs to be expanded to include the politics of expertise and institutional innovations for increasing information flows between experts and societal actors.