In 1998, two chemists, Paul Anastas and John Warner, co-authored a manifesto, 12 Principles of Green Chemistry, and founded a movement to teach chemists how to reduce or eliminate hazardous chemistry.
Now, that movement has come to the fashion world (finally!)
A few weeks ago, my friend and colleague, Michelle Gabriel, a sustainable fashion researcher and strategist who now lectures at Yale, sent me an email titled excitedly telling me about how Yale is doing fashion chemistry. Margaret Kerr, PhD, who is the Director of Education at the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale, has spun off a special version of their professional certificate program on Green Chemistry to focus on fashion’s supply chain.
(If you want to learn about fashion chemistry, you can apply here. It’s open until July 8th.)
I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to discuss fashion chemistry with a do-good chemist, so I got on Zoom with Kerr to figure out what she thinks about toxic chemicals in fashion and other consumer products. (Actually, I’ll call her Margaret. We’re all friends here.)
Read on for why she’s so fascinated by the fashion industry, what the program includes, what she thinks about people who have soured on innovation, and how she keeps herself sane in a world full of hazardous chemicals and misinformation. Here’s our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity:
Alden: What’s your personal interest in green chemistry? What sparked you to go in this direction?
Margaret: Well, I’ve always been interested in the environment. Ironically, I never took chemistry in high school, and so I didn’t learn about it until I was in college. But I loved looking at things from the molecular level. I worked in the petrochemical industry making polypropylene in Houston, Texas for two years after my postdoc, and seeing the grand scale of just one company’s polymer production was amazing—the amount of stuff that we can create so easily, but it’s also amazing in the amount of waste that we produce. I came to understand that a lot of what we do is not safe or healthy, for the people or the planet.
In the fall of 2000 I decided to take an academic position at Worcester State University. About three years later, somebody retired pretty suddenly, and they put me in charge of the organic lab, and I got offered to go to a Green Chemistry in Education conference at the University of Oregon. And that put a lot of the pieces together for me, to say here’s the chemistry that we do, and here are some of the changes that we can make to improve it while still being creative scientists and making the things that we all like to use.
Since 2003 I’ve been involved in both national and international curriculum development around green chemistry, lecture and lab programming, and I’ve had two Fulbrights to Thailand that allowed me to do this work primarily in Southeast Asia, but also in Poland and other different parts of the world.
I overlapped with [Green Chemistry co-founder] Paul at a conference where I was running a workshop in December of 2023, and about a month later, he called me up and asked if I would want to change jobs and run this program at Yale.
Alden: That’s interesting you worked for a plastics factory right out of school. I was talking to somebody who was a geology major, and they were like, “I didn’t realize that if I did environmental science or geology, the only money would be in working in the oil industry.” Is it the same in chemistry, where the money’s in working in various applications of petrochemicals?