Congratulations to Phil Jessop and his team!
Queen's gets green cash; Province gives $9 million for clean chemical research; from the federal government to build a centre to develop greener chemicals.
The money will be used to build and staff cutting-edge labs at the Queen's owned Innovation Park on the old Alcan site and pay for experts to figure out how to develop and market academic research aimed at reducing pollution and waste.
"The old way to fight pollution was to do everything inside the factory the way you've always done, but put a scrubber on the smokestack outside," said Phil Jessop, an internationally recognized chemist in the area of green technologies who will be technical director of the centre.
"The new way to fight pollution is green chemistry, to design the system to reduce the amount of pollution generated."
As he and others noted, research scientists are rarely marketers and businesspeople, so the centre will assist them in bringing promising new technology to market.
"These technologies are going to die unless we help them," he said.
Goodyear said Queen's was chosen as one of five such centers of excellence from 34 submissions from other schools and industry groups across Canada.
He said by investing in the centre, Canada was positioning itself to be a world leader in green chemistry, particularly during an economic climate when such technologies hold out the hope of reducing costs to industry if they adopt them.
He also said that developing processes to reduce pollution and waste was the right thing for the government to support.
"From basic research results comes the opportunity to improve life on this planet, but to do so, you have to get those [results] to market."
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