2025 Green Chemistry Challenge Award Winners

Phosphorus is essential for life, and phosphate fertilizers play a major role in food production. Traditionally, the wet-acid method for making these fertilizers consumes large amounts of phosphate rock and sulfur, leading to the creation of phosphogypsum—a corrosive and radioactive waste that has inherent hazards and environment risks. Globally, this waste accumulates at approximately 400 tons per minute. In Florida alone, over one billion tons are stored across 24 sites, with 27 million tons added each year. Novaphos has developed a patented thermal process that extracts and recovers sulfur from phosphogypsum, enabling its reuse in fertilizer manufacturing. This process also uses sand to produce safe calcium silicate, which can be used in concrete. Research indicates that calcium silicate performs as well as fly ash when used as a cement substitute. Lab tests have shown that the process effectively immobilizes radioactive substances, reducing radon-222 emissions to levels similar to soil or granite. Third-party risk assessments confirm Novaphos calcium silicates require no special handling. Furthermore, calcium silicate can enhance soils and improve crop resilience, especially for rice and sugarcane.

With global sulfur supplies tightening, converting phosphogypsum into reusable sulfur minimizes the hazardous waste associated with phosphate production. As coal consumption drops worldwide, there’s less fly ash available. With reduced CO₂ emissions compared to standard cement production, the Novaphos calcium silicates help address both resource shortages and sustainability issues in the cement industry.

Led by the green chemistry principles of waste prevention, design for energy efficiency, and use of renewable feedstocks, Pure Lithium has invented the first commercially viable Lithium metal (Li-M) battery.

The Li-M anode offers 10x the maximum theoretical energy density of the conventional lithium-ion anode. Lithium is naturally found in hard rock deposits or brines. Brine extraction is cleaner than mining and takes place primarily in the South American lithium triangle. The precursor compounds are transported to Asia for refinement into battery-grade materials, relying on extreme conditions and toxic reagents. The resulting material is not pure or uniform enough to economically commercialize Li-M batteries.

Pure Lithium solves these technological and sustainability barriers by innovating from cradle to grave. The company has demonstrated lithium extraction from industrial waste and real-world low-grade brines across four continents. This enables localized supply chains and recycling viability. Downstream, Pure Lithium’s Brine to Battery™ process enables one-step extraction / anode fabrication, eliminating the need for precursor compounds, massively improving efficiency and reducing waste. The company has already demonstrated competitive battery performance using in-house Li-M. This technology was first invented in 2020 by Founder Emilie Bodoin, and her now granted patents serve as the foundational IP for the company.

On the cathode-side, Pure Lithium holds a joint patent with Nobel Laureat Sir Professor M. Stanley Whittingham pairing our Li-M anode with a vanadium cathode. The vanadium cathodes eliminate the need for cobalt, nickel, and lithium precursors, while demonstrating better thermal stability than nickel-based cathodes. Pure Lithium has owned or licensed all forms of vanadium suitable to use in lithium metal batteries. Spanning the value chain, Pure Lithium holds over 130 granted or pending patent applications from cradle to grave.

The first Pure Lithium lab was established in 2021 in Boston, MA. By 2025, the company met its R&D milestones and relocated to Chicago, IL to launch a pilot manufacturing facility. Pure Lithium has been awarded the 2024 World Materials Forum Coup de Coeur Start Up Award; 2025 Reuters Global Energy Transition Prize for R&D; and a 2025 ACS Green Chemistry Award. Bodoin has been named the 2025 Fastmarkets Trailblazing Woman of the Year and Chicago Business Journal’s 10 people to watch in Chicago Business 2026.

Despite advances in green chemistry, pharmaceutical manufacturing remains resource and waste intensive due to complex syntheses and stringent quality requirements. Merck’s commitment to environmental sustainability drives Process Chemistry to develop more sustainable active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacturing processes. This presentation will describe the development of a fully biocatalytic route to islatravir (MK8591), recipient of a 2025 Green Chemistry Challenge Award. This innovative biocatalytic process converts a simple five carbon glycerol derivative to islatravir via a linked enzyme cascade, reducing organic solvent usage, protecting group manipulations, step count, and waste generation while improving selectivity and overall efficiency relative to traditional chemocatalytic routes. By integrating multiple engineered enzymes to deliver islatravir with high selectivity and robustness, this work demonstrates that enzyme cascades can simultaneously meet quality and sustainability targets, establishing biocatalysis as a practical strategy for greener, lower waste API manufacturing.

Nickel catalysis offers a sustainable alternative to widely used precious metal–based catalytic transformations, but its adoption has been limited by the air- and moisture-sensitivity of common Ni(0) precursors such as Ni(COD)₂, which require energy-intensive inert-atmosphere handling. We report a family of air-stable Ni(0) precatalysts based on modular electron-deficient diene ligands that enable glovebox-free nickel catalysis across a broad range of C–C and C–heteroatom bond-forming reactions. These precatalysts exhibit reactivity comparable to or exceeding that of Ni(COD)₂ and palladium catalysts in cross-coupling, borylation, and C–H activation. A scalable electrochemical synthesis replaces pyrophoric reductants with electrons, improving safety and reducing waste. Commercialization and rapid uptake in academic and pharmaceutical settings demonstrate the potential of this technology to reduce energy consumption, displace precious metals, and advance greener synthetic pathways.