Retailers and industry have tried to paint themselves green through the marketing of so-called “green” laundry detergents. The January 29 issue Chemical & Engineering News claims that this represents parties having “taken the leading role in a new effort by retailers and industry to market mainstream, environmentally friendly consumer products.”
The cleaning products industry has apparently embraced sustainability, with various innovations, including energy-efficient laundry detergents that work without hot water and other products that degrade once they go down the drain.
Report author Michael McCoy says that, “Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. has been a major catalyst in the green detergent revolution. Using its purchasing power as the world’s biggest retailer, Wal-Mart launched an environmental initiative last October to encourage its suppliers to manufacture more environmentally friendly laundry detergents. Laws and regulations in the United States and the European Union are giving industry additional regulatory incentive to go green with mainstream consumer products,” he adds.
A consideration that is missing from the notion that any laundry product can be “green” is the fact that even the most modern and efficient washing machines and dryers still use huge amounts of energy and vast amounts of water. There is nothing “green” about washing clothes, especially given the common western notion that one wear means an article of clothing is dirty and must be washed.
Now I’m not advocating a return to washboards, mangles, and a weekly bath in front of the hearth, but those in the developed world cannot possibly hope to be “green” as long as we’re using water and energy to wash and dry clothes. In many parts of the world (and coming to a town near you, any time soon) there are millions of people who live day to day with minimal water. An aboriginal Australian told me on a trip to the outback many years ago that he simply couldn’t understand why we’d waste water in such a way when it is such a precious commodity.
Swiss chemists have devised a new approach to the familiar analytical technique of Raman spectroscopy that allows them to investigate the structure of individual molecules.
Advocates of nuclear power point to recent advances in waste storage materials that could allow the radioactive byproducts of the nuclear industry to be stored safely and indefinitely in ceramics rather than glass. Whereas those not in favour of splitting atoms to produce almost limitless energy point out that even vitrified nuclear waste will represent an ongoing problem for thousands of years.
Two back-to-back papers in the well-known chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie recently could have potentially serious consequences for the pharmaceutical industry, because they reveal what the authors claim are inherent ambiguities in the crystalline forms of aspirin.
Researchers from Slovenia have used spectroscopy to home in on the active site of an essential bacterial enzyme, DNA gyrase. They say they now understand more clearly how a compound found in green tea, EGCG, which is a health-boosting antioxidant, works to kill bacteria.
A simple Q tip is all it takes to grab a microscopic sample from a work of art for laboratory testing, according to Canadian analytical chemists. They’ve used the approach to sample darkening pigments from an ancient map and from a piece of modern art as proof of principle.
Regular readers will recall my mention of the 
Spam comes in all shapes and forms, so I am always suspicious when two emails identical in content and with attachments arrive that purport to be from two different correspondents. However, two such messages arrived this morning one claiming to come from a Dr Suhasini Bhatnagar, the other from Aarif Khatri. Normally, I’d let my spam filter do its job and trash such messages, but my interest was piqued by the subject line, which read “help regarding synthesis”. Often spam arrives with two random words stuck together that are supposed to beat spam filters, but three is rare and even less frequent are subject lines that make logical sense and simultaneously are pertinent to my interests.