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Asked by anon-240021 to Struan, Charlotte, Isabel, Douglas on 18 Mar 2020.
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Struan Simpson answered on 18 Mar 2020:
Do you mean energy efficient? If so, I think it can be quite difficult for chemistry departments in universities like mine to be energy efficient. We either produce a lot of waste, which needs a lot of energy to be disposed of and/or treated, or we need a lot of energy to do reactions, maybe by using high-tech equipment or leaving reactions to run for days at a time!
Recently scientists have started thinking about how we can make chemistry “greener” – that is, how can we do things in chemistry without producing as much waste, or using so much energy. There are a bunch of different ways we might be able to do this!
One that we’re looking to try and do in our research group is to use microwaves to help us make our materials – and when I say microwaves, I literally mean a kitchen microwave! It turns out they’re actually really good at doing chemical reactions, and you can do reactions that would normally take you days to do in a matter of minutes! This means you use a lot less energy to make your materials, and you become a lot more energy efficient as a result.
This is just one example, but there’s lots of different ways to do it. If you’re interested in learning more, look up “green chemistry”!
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Douglas Bray answered on 20 Mar 2020:
I work in the Energy Building at my university so I would hope that it is fairly efficient. However, as Straun has stated it is very difficult for departments in Universities to be energy efficient as we produce huge volumes of waste and run very energy intensive equipment.
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