Environmental Genome Initiative

Mapping the Essential Building Blocks of Human Creativity

Awarded the 2017 Innovation in Smart Chemistry sponsored by Nike, NASA, U.S. Department of State, Estee Lauder, American Chemical Society Green Chemistry Institute, and U.S. Agency for International Development.

Environmental Genome chart FINAL w head sub (1)

Mission

The nonprofit Environmental Genome Initiative is collaborating with product manufacturers and the philanthropic community to build an open-source database to analyze the content, design, manufacturing processes and energy use of the 100,000 industrial chemicals-in-commerce. These chemicals make virtually all materials and products worldwide.

Our goal is to produce the map of the environmental footprints of all products by first establishing the carbon footprint of the industrial chemicals used, a critical base of any product. It will estimate emissions and greenhouse gas intensity data not currently available and provide the means for Scope 3 reporting of the indirect emissions of a company’s manufactured products and the upstream and downstream activities in its value chain.

Our vision is that with this next generation life cycle inventory data, companies will no longer have to risk relying on imprecise emissions measures that use industry averages. They’ll be able to respond confidently to policymakers, investors and consumers who want better climate-risk information to inform decision making. The database will allow firms to accurately measure, manage and minimize their impact on the environment and on human health, improve their product designs and supply chains while lowering costs as they achieve greater efficiencies.

We envision the project will also yield other large, unforeseen economic benefits and health benefits as we have learned from the evolution for mapping the human genome.

Major Benefits

Manufacturing Analysis and Improvement

Genome segments show energy and mass efficiency for every chemical manufacturing plant in a larger boundary than just one corporation and so it opens scope for more improvement

Public health information related to all the products we consume

Genome database informs improvements in social determinants of health (SDOH) with manufacturing plant data on emissions and disability-adjusted life years (DALY)
Web of chemicals and materials is the fundamental source information for public impacts of emissions to air, water, and land (known as the exposome)

Value Propositions

Public Health Improvement

Human exposome and toxicology
Social Determinants of Health
Policy implications

Manufacturing

Energy and mass efficiency
Process design and supply chains
Consumer product improvements
Chemical fingerprinting
National competitiveness and security

Environmental Impacts

Carbon footprints
GIS overlays
Climate change implications

Enabling of new research

Systems chemistry and Earth System Science
Product life cycle technologies

Vision

Over a six year period, the current vision is a six component large scale initiative.

Build on a well-developed system, tested already on 1,500 chemicals in commerce to establish a high efficiency routing system to map the full Web of 100,000 chemicals in commerce (which account for 95+ percent of all global non-agricultural products).
Drive down the time and cost to map each segment of the genome by better data mining, physical properties techniques, and genome structure mapping.
Move through four funding stages over a fully active six year span, to lead the nonprofit organization and the open source database, but supporting for-profit analytics to use this large new innovative information field.
Identify and initiate teams (of approximately 25 genome developers and two manager/review specialists) in multiple U.S. locations and international countries.
Educate and encourage, from the start, broad support and collaboration from the chemical/materials manufacturing sector and the public health sector (in the exposome and elsewhere) through presentations and other visibility mechanisms.
Develop flexible specialist teams to guide the mapping process for greater efficiency, to verify waste management effects, to increase the capacity of the mapping tools and database, and to fund research and development projects that utilize genome information with outside groups.

It is anticipated that the new knowledge generated in this Web will guide improvements to this vision and will foster diverse for-profit organizations that build analytics from the genome development.

More information – presentations, articles, and examples

Overview
This is a recent Power Point presentation given to describe the evolution and content of the Environmental Genome Initiative. Similar presentations are underway to groups with direct interest in the mapping of the Environmental Genome.
Green Chemistry EGIP article
The discovery of the environmental genome for industrial products was published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in the Journal of Green Chemistry. The full paper includes the origin of the repeatable structure of the environmental genomic segments and the implications for mapping the full genome.
Example: alpha-methylstyrene
This full example covers the manufacture of the MTHF and shows the diversity of data in the environmental genome database.
Example: Triethyl Aluminum (TEAL)
This full example covers the manufacture of the TEAL and shows the types of data in the environmental genome database.
Example: Acrolein
This full example covers the manufacture of Acrolein and shows the types of data in the environmental genome database.
Transparency Document of Diagnostic X-Ray Imaging article
The Environmental Genome study of diagnostic x-ray imaging incorporates 7 major patient
anatomies, electrical energy, and consumables. This document details these calculations.