Driving Sustainable Product Design from Ideation to Commercialization

For most of human history, products were derived directly from the natural world: candles from wax, dyes from plants, soaps from fats and oils. Over the past century, this shifted dramatically toward petrochemical and synthetic routes that unlocked performance and cost advantages, but often relied on high temperatures, high pressures, and environmentally intensive solvents. These approaches enabled modern industry but also introduced sustainability challenges that are increasingly difficult to ignore.

Biocatalysis offers a compelling alternative by harnessing nature’s catalysts, enzymes, to manufacture chemicals with remarkable precision under mild conditions. Over the last several decades, enzymes have been successfully deployed to produce everything from high-value pharmaceutical intermediates to large-volume commodities such as acrylamide. Compared to traditional chemical catalysis, enzymatic processes can offer improved efficiency, reduced energy input, and simplified downstream separations.

Despite this promise, fewer than one percent of known enzymes have been implemented in industrial processes. Widespread adoption has been limited by challenges including insufficient enzyme longevity, difficulty operating under industrial conditions, and overall process cost.

Cascade Bio is focused on closing this gap. Through its proprietary Body Armor for Enzymes™ technology, Cascade Bio enables enzymes to operate longer, perform more reliably, and be deployed economically at industrial scale. By improving enzyme durability and total productivity, biocatalysis can move beyond niche applications and become a practical, competitive manufacturing strategy.

This talk will explore how enzyme-enabled manufacturing can deliver not only sustainability, but also improved product performance and cost competitiveness. Drawing from real-world examples, it will highlight how designing products and processes inspired by biology can unlock new commercial opportunities across industries.

The development of safer and more sustainable materials is accelerating in response to growing regulatory expectations, customer commitments, and societal pressure. As part of Dow’s 2025 Sustainability Goal, Safe Materials for a Sustainable Planet we identified ten sustainable alternatives based on four criteria compared to an incumbent 1) better human and environmental profile, 2) favorable life cycle assessment 3) comparable performance, and 4) market acceptance. An evaluation of the journey of the ten sustainable alternatives highlighted several critical lessons learned in bringing safer solutions to market. These case studies reveal a complex landscape: regulatory and consumer drivers alone rarely ensure adoption; performance and cost must remain competitive; and market acceptance hinges on early and sustained engagement across the value chain. Even when sustainability benefits are clear, customer reluctance, cost sensitivity, technical complexity, and entrenched manufacturing systems can delay or limit adoption, although there are some exceptions. At the same time, Dow’s journey demonstrates how proactive innovation, transparent communication, and deep collaboration can shape markets and position the company as a leader in safer materials. By sharing real world examples and the challenges encountered along the way, this work aims to offer practitioners and decision makers a candid view into what it takes to advance safer, sustainable material innovations in practice and how leadership, persistence, and system level thinking are essential to driving meaningful progress.

Once the industrial and regulatory frame is set during product design, changes become costly and restricted, significantly reducing the remaining innovation space. Late-stage attention to sustainability often locks projects into narrow design frames, limiting optimization to incremental improvements rather than enabling fundamental green innovations.
We discuss strategies for treating sustainable product design as an integrated techno-economic-regulatory system from day one to ensure that green chemistry innovations translate into robust industrial applications.
An early focus on green metrics expands design freedom before industrial and regulatory constraints lock in the design. Upscaling strategies, cost security, and supply-chain considerations must therefore go hand in hand. Embedding these criteria from the earliest stages of product design reduces technical risk and increases long-term economic viability.

The sustainable production of bio-derived alkoxybutenolide monomers presents a promising alternative to conventional acrylate-based coatings. Here, we report the optimization and scale-up of the synthesis of these monomers, leading to the development of a continuous-flow process with significantly improved efficiency. The first step involves the oxidation of furfural using photogenerated singlet oxygen, followed by a condensation reaction at ambient temperature to produce additional desired monomers.
This approach facilitated the scale-up of photo-oxidation to an 85% isolated yield, with a productivity of 1.3 kg day^-1 and a space-time yield of 0.06 mol day^-1 mL^-1. Further improvements demonstrated potential productivities of up to 4 to 10 kg day^-1.
Building upon these advancements, a startup (https://circolide.com/) has been established to further develop and commercialize this scalable synthesis platform for bio-based monomers to be used in polymers and coatings. This work demonstrates how process intensification and flow chemistry innovations can drive sustainable chemical manufacturing, offering a viable pathway for the industrial adoption of renewable monomers.

Pet care is a multibillion-dollar industry with high material throughput yet remains largely absent from green chemistry discourse. Cat litter alone drives millions of tons of mineral extraction annually, primarily sodium bentonite clay that is strip-mined, processed, transported at high density, and landfilled after single use.

This presentation reframes litter as an engineered functional material and examines how green chemistry principles can reduce environmental burden while maintaining performance.

1. Material Efficiency
Clumping clay litters exhibit bulk densities of ~800–1,000 kg/m3. Engineered amorphous silica substrates demonstrate densities of ~350–450 kg/m3 with comparable or improved absorption.

Metrics:
BET surface area: 300–800 m2/g (silica) vs. <100 m2g (clay)
Water absorption: 0.8–1.5 mL/g (silica) vs. 0.5–1.0 mL/g (clay)
Shipping mass: up to ~40–50% lower per functional use
Lower density reduces transportation emissions and annual material throughput.

2. Surface Chemistry and Odor Control
Odor control targets ammonia (NH3), volatile sulfur compounds, and short-chain fatty acids. Rather than broad antimicrobials, porous silica leverages surface chemistry and pore design.
Examples:
Ammonia adsorption: 8–15 mg NH3/g
Breakthrough time: up to 2× improvement with acid-functionalized surfaces
Dust control: respirable fraction <1% (<75 µm) via granule stabilization
This approach supports hazard reduction and elimination of persistent additives.

3. Circular Feedstocks and Energy
Bio-derived silica from rice husk ash (~85–95% amorphous silica after purification) offers reduced virgin extraction and integration into agricultural waste streams.
Lower calcination temperatures (600–700°C vs. >900°C) present energy reduction opportunities.

4. Additive Minimization
Colorimetric systems operate at low loadings (<0.5% w/w). Reformulation aims to reduce additive mass, limit leaching via microencapsulation, and maintain performance while lowering ecotoxicological burden.

Conclusion
Pet litter is a high-volume mineral system that has largely escaped green chemistry scrutiny. Applying materials science metrics — surface area, adsorption kinetics, density optimization, and additive minimization — reveals substantial opportunity for sustainable redesign. Green chemistry in pet care represents structural re-engineering at scale.

Delta S, a green chemistry technology that rejuvenates recycled asphalt pavement (RAP) in asphalt mix designs and the surface of existing asphalt pavements. Historically, additives used in asphalt rejuvenation are petroleum based and pose environmental and worker safety hazards. Delta S, developed at the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry by Collaborative Aggregates, is an environmentally friendly, bio-based product comprising a small molecule dispersion in a plant extracted, carrier oil. This product is cost-competitive and, since its commercial launch in 2015, has demonstrated superior performance over petroleum-based additives in numerous laboratory and field trials across the country, has gained state approval as a warm mix additive in 18 states, plus DC, as well as reduced the amount of virgin asphalt (binder, aggregate and sand) used in new road construction upwards of 30,000 tons.

In 2023, PPG introduced its Enterprise Growth Strategy to strengthen its position as the preferred partner for innovative coatings, specialty products and productivity solutions. A review of fourteen major innovations from the past five decades showed that many advanced customer sustainability goals alongside productivity and performance. To understand the drivers of sustainability focused innovation, we analyzed three representative projects in depth. The study highlights the crucial role of technical teams and identifies three recurring themes that enabled success. These findings also align with best practices for transformational and noncore innovation, offering practical guidance for other companies developing sustainability driven solutions.

Green chemistry will only realize its full potential as the game changer we all know it can be if more people outside the field—corporate managers, investors, consumers, policy makers, voters, educators, students, and so on—hear more about it and understand its power to drive a more sustainable future. Because it’s the decisions these people make in their daily lives that ultimately determine if green chemistry advancements find acceptance and success in the real world.

The Green Chem Essential news site was established to help meet that goal. In this talk, James Rea, science communications professional and founder of Green Chem Essential, will share the philosophy and methods that drive his work.

This session will help green chemistry innovators of all stripes more effectively usher their creations into the world.

In sustainable product design, profitability and sustainability are often framed as opposite ends of the same spectrum, with sustainable products on one side and profit on the other. This dichotomy leads to projects stalling or being canceled at the first sign of trouble, and impedes the long-term vision needed for such projects. Furthermore, while technology is often seen as the main barrier in sustainable product design, projects more often fail after overcoming technological hurdles due to organizational challenges in functions supporting operations and rollout.
Tarkett Sports has attained Ecovadis Platinum and CDP A List certifications for being leaders in both sustainability and innovative product design. Our continued success has been driven by a strong organizational culture that not only challenges but empowers individuals in all departments, focusing on long-term objectives rather than short-term profitability. This supports our team’s focus on cross-functional problem-solving, which is critical for streamlining operations and building the capabilities needed to profitably implement new product manufacturing or alternate processing methods.
In this presentation, we will discuss two select sustainability projects in sports surfacing and field systems: one in recycling postindustrial and end of life sports turf materials, and the other in adding recycled content to our product lines. We will discuss how they were developed, starting from the original objective, through conception and technological barriers, to operational implementation, and finally commercial rollout. These projects resulted in an improved sustainability profile – higher recycled content, lower carbon, or reduced waste to landfill, as well as a favorable economic outcome in terms of market acceptance, profitability, customer satisfaction.