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Chasing Molecules

Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry

Elizabeth Grossman

Published: 09/07/2009
Publisher: Shearwater
288 p. 6 x 9
Appendix. Manuscript.
ISBN: 9781597263702
Hardcover: $26.96

Biographies | Table Of Contents

Each day, headlines warn that baby bottles are leaching dangerous chemicals, nonstick pans are causing infertility, and plastic containers are making us fat. What if green chemistry could change all that? What if rather than toxics, our economy ran on harmless, environmentally-friendly materials?

Elizabeth Grossman, an acclaimed journalist who brought national attention to the contaminants hidden in computers and other high tech electronics, now tackles the hazards of ordinary consumer products. She shows that for the sake of convenience, efficiency, and short-term safety, we have created synthetic chemicals that fundamentally change, at a molecular level, the way our bodies work. The consequences range from diabetes to cancer, reproductive and neurological disorders.

Yet it’s hard to imagine life without the creature comforts current materials provide—and Grossman argues we do not have to. A scientific revolution is introducing products that are “benign by design,” developing manufacturing processes that consider health impacts at every stage, and is creating new compounds that mimic rather than disrupt natural systems. Through interviews with leading researchers, Grossman gives us a first look at this radical transformation.

Green chemistry is just getting underway, but it offers hope that we can indeed create products that benefit health, the environment, and industry.

Biographies

Elizabeth Grossman is the author of High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health, Watershed: The Undamming of America, and Adventuring Along the Lewis and Clark Trail. Her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, The Nation, Salon, The Washington Post, and other publications. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Prologue
Chapter 1 There’s Something in the Air
Chapter 2 Swimmers, Hoppers, and Fliers
Chapter 3 Laboratory Curiosities and Chemical Unknowns
Chapter 4 The Polycarbonate Problem
Chapter 5 Plasticizers: Health Risks or Fifty Years of Denial of Data?
Chapter 6 The Persistent and Pernicious
Chapter 7 Out of the Frying Pan
Chapter 8 Nanotechnology: Perils and Promise of the Infinitesimal
Chapter 9 Material Consequences: Toward a Greening of Chemistry
Epilogue: Redesigning the Future
Acknowledgments
Appendix: The Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry and Further Information
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

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