Safer (and more effective) chemistry starts with a bioinspired approach | Terry Collins | TEDxBoston
Can we invent safer chemistry? Trace pharmaceuticals, pesticides and other everyday chemicals escape into wastewater, eventually making it into drinking water. These compounds are introducing toxicity to ecosystems and in some cases disrupting the endocrine systems of aquatic creatures. Even with wastewater treatment, drinking water supplies and food sources for humans and animals alike are facing contamination. Our solution sets to remove pollutants often involve using more water and chemicals to wash away or dilute problematic compounds. Natural systems have a more efficient approach. By mimicking nature, chemists have developed TAML catalysts to copy and intensify the natural metabolism of chemicals at a deployable scale. In a remarkably easy-to-apply technology, tiny amounts of TAML together with small peroxide concentrations create a reaction that can safely neutralize numerous wastewater pollutants in proportionally vast quantities of water. By fundamentally changing the approach, this new chemistry method has many potential applications and opportunities for global scale and impact. Terry Collins is the principal inventor of bio-inspired TAML activators, the most technically proficient homogeneous oxidation catalysts across both chemistry and biology. He created and followed for 40+ years an iterative oxidation catalyst design protocol that yielded the first TAML activator after 15 years; 30 years on, the protocol continues to advance TAML technical performances for myriad applications. Collins is the Creator-Founder of Sudoc, LLC, the global ambition, highly awarded CMU spinoff company that is scaling TAMLs commercially. Terry Collins taught the first university course at the Chemistry/Sustainability interface, iterating it over 30+ years for understanding and fixing unsustainability within the chemical enterprise. He sees endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) as a climate change scale existential threat and spends much of his time working through teaching, research, public service, and entrepreneurship to reduce EDC contamination of people and the environment. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
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