A new method for removing fluorines from fluorinated chemicals offers a promising method to detoxify some types of organohalogen pollutants, such as CFCs.

With just a pinch of salt, a team of researchers in Japan have come up with an environmentally friendly catalyst to build pharmaceutically useful 2,3-dihydrobenzofuran motifs.

To engineer designs so small they can only be seen through the most powerful microscopes - plus use renewable materials and no harmful processing chemicals - is no easy feat, Renzo Shamey and Khaled El-Tahlawy discovered.

Next time a company brags about their sustainable packaging, ask why they aren't growing it themselves. Steelcase, a Michigan-based office furniture company, is doing exactly that as part of a partnership with packaging startup Ecovative.

There is a revolution occurring - the return of consumer insight to the health and wellness of our personal care products. This move is away from the creation of products with toxic chemicals and toward a more mindful development of our chemistry.

Louisiana's brown pelicans have a better chance of avoiding Big Oil than you do. Oil permeates our lives in ways we never think about. It's in carpeting, furniture, computers and clothing. It's in toothpaste, shaving cream, lipstick and vitamin capsules. And because of all that, petrochemicals are in our blood.

Louisiana's brown pelicans have a better chance of avoiding Big Oil than you do. Oil permeates our lives in ways we never think about. It's in carpeting, furniture, computers and clothing. It's in toothpaste, shaving cream, lipstick and vitamin capsules. And because of all that, petrochemicals are in our blood.

The Green Products Innovation Institute is a type of green product certification that is simply the future opportunity for change on a scale never achieved by the design profession.

Back in the days when better living through chemistry was a promise, not a bitter irony, nylon stockings replaced silk, refrigerators edged out iceboxes, and Americans became increasingly dependent on man-made materials.

Chemists have made progress in finding environmentally friendly ways to capture and reuse carbon dioxide. New advances have been made in the ability to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and incorporate it into new raw materials – including benign alternatives to BPA-based plastics.

With help from star architect William McDonough, a "green products" institute is born.

Paul T. Anastas, professor of chemistry for the environment at Yale University, director of Yale's Center for Green Chemistry & Green Engineering, and the EPA assistant administrator for the Office of R&D, has produced the "Handbook of Green Chemistry."

The Green Products Innovation Institute, formally announced at Google corporate headquarters here, builds on a 2008 state law that seeks to establish the nation's first "green chemistry" program.

Most importantly, nature curbs excesses from within — a principle we are only now coming to grips with, and not a moment too soon.