JEAN-MARIE BASSETT
Member of Chimica Oggi / Chemistry Today Scientific Advisory Board
TNO Business Development Manager, Chemicals Industry

We live in exciting times.
Never before has the chemicals industry had a similar opportunity to examine itself and make choices in the adoption of innovation. It is singularly fascinating to observe the increasing presence of important players from chemicals and pharmaceuticals manufacturing, academia and innovation-based organisations and enterprises at conferences, symposia and fairs engaged in promoting, debating or simply selling new technologies. Whether one assigns this realism to a sudden realisation of how unsustainable some processes are, or how unsustainable certain feed-stocks might be, the issue remains the same. Innovation is being sought for. In any case, we can safely discount simple cost-cutting as the main driver, when compared with the whole portfolio of challenges facing chemicals producers today. The opportunity lies before us: doing chemistry under more non-traditional extreme conditions is becoming easier.
In recent years, and consistently promoted by Chimica Oggi - Chemistry Today, attention has been given to flow-chemistry as a way to help overcome production pitfalls, perform advanced chemistry more elegantly and safely, and to reduce was ...