Sustainable Chemistry - A concept with important links to waste management

Sustainable Chemistry is an overarching concept encompassing the design, manufacture and use of efficient, effective, safe and more environmentally benign chemical products and processes. With respect to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, 2015), the Sustainable Chemistry concept may serve as an important tool to reach these objectives including a high number of targets for chemicals and waste management. Sustainable Chemistry might become a valuable contribution to present waste management issues: Recycling of waste and recovery of resources from waste fractions are often severely restricted by the chemical composition of used products. These restrictions include components, which turned out to be hazardous, mixed materials like plastics with numerous additives, composite materials, which cannot be separated properly like plastics/wood, or low concentrated scarce metals in electronic devices. Following the concept of Sustainable Chemistry, - higher resource efficiency and increasing use of waste-derived renewable resources without endangering food production, - use of substances, which are not only less toxic but also better degradable under natural conditions (benign by design), - design of products which allow recycling by avoidance of inseparable combinations of materials and firmly fixed modules (design for recycling), might be achieved. The paper aims to demonstrate the benefits of integrating waste management issues into the concept of Sustainable Chemistry to avoid further unilateral technical solutions, which do not take re-use or recovery of resources into account.