The next wave of cleantech investing:  Getting beyond energytech

We had a great REBN-Boston event last night at the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry.  John Warner spoke about his journey into the field of green chemistry, and about the need for green principles to be integrated into chemistry methodologies -- not just for health and environmental reasons, but for profitability reasons as well. 

You can read some of Warner's thinking on the subject in an old interview here.  For example, Warner mentioned last night that DuPont spends $1B per year on research and development -- and $1B per year on regulatory compliance related to their products and processes.  The problem, in Warner's view, is that chemists are never trained in areas like toxicity and environmental impacts of the chemicals they work with and create.  So it's no surprise, therefore, that it becomes so expensive to deal with the waste and toxicity of the chemicals at "the end of the pipe".  Instead, if processes and products were designed with green principles and lessons in mind, up front, we could see more effective, cost-competitive and safe chemicals and processes right from the start.

This isn't just a pesticides and chemical additives issue.  Such chemistry-based design decisions are at the heart of other cleantech sectors like thin-film solar, water treatment, membranes, agriculture, etc.

It's a great example of the next wave of cleantech:  Everything else beyond energytech.  While climate change, energy independence and energy supply concerns have elevated energy technologies thus far in the cleantech pantheon, we continue to see looming natural resource shortages in other areas like water supplies, agriculture and food, and basic materials/ commodities.

It may not be this year, but at some point those other markets are going to develop to the point where they will be ripe for innovation and rapid adoption of alternative technologies.  And methodologies like Green Chemistry may help spur such innovation, in proprietary ways that VCs love to see.