Marcin Krasnodębski

Sanfte Chemie, or soft chemistry, is a scientific and philosophical concept developed in the 1980s under the auspices of the German Green Party (Die Grünen). Its purpose was to thoroughly reconstruct not only the chemical industry but also chemistry as a science in the spirit of environmentalism. Soft chemistry followers wanted to forge a new scientific method and criticized what they called a Baconian-Cartesian paradigm in the philosophy of science. Even though the sanfte Chemie project ceased to be endorsed by the Green Party in the 1990s because of its radicalism, the history of epistemological foundations, on which the soft chemistry was built, gives us a privileged insight into a vision of chemical sciences as advocated by early proponents of sustainability and pioneers of environmental movements.

The article analyses sources of sanfte Chemie, highlighting plurality and complexity of scientific, philosophical, political and ideological traditions that served as its basis. The study of the eco-critical narratives on empirical sciences allows us to better understand subsequent political choices concerning science, industry and the environment in Germany. In particular, the article shows that the tradition on which sanfte Chemie was built, gives it the advantage over later concepts, such as green chemistry, that lack philosophical depth.

The purpose of the article is to question the relation between the philosophy of science and the practice of science and ponder whether different chemistry is possible at all.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, environmental protection has played an increasingly important role both in the chemical industry and in the scientific work of chemists in the academic world. A noteworthy feature of the so-called green chemistry and sustainable chemistry is the emphasis that practitioners of both disciplines lay on codifying the principles, rules, and characteristics that environmentally friendly chemical reactions and processes should meet. These codifications have a complicated epistemological status: they aim to set the criteria of ‘greenness’, indicate the direction of scientific development, and build the foundations for new research programs. While the most famous of these codifications are the twelve principles of green chemistry developed in the United States in 1998, successive attempts to codify a new type of environmentally friendly chemistry have been regularly made over the last twenty years – not only in the United States but also in Germany. Starting with American green chemistry, through German ‘soft chemistry’ (sanfte Chemie) and chemistry for sustainable development, and ending with circular chemistry, this article is an attempt to familiarize the Polish reader with this new tool in the work of researchers and engineers. Its purpose is to pay particular attention to the context of the creation and interpretation of consecutive sets of rules of a new type of chemistry and the challenges related to their application.

Solvay’s Centre de Recherches d’Aubervilliers (CRA) is one of the oldest active private-sector research centers in industrial chemistry in France. During the seventy years of its existence it collaborated with some of the most significant French and European chemical companies. Established in 1953, the center’s research and development organization around huge discipline-oriented laboratories proved itself remarkably resilient. Not merely reflecting the R&D policy of the company that owned it at a given moment, the evolution of the center’s research organization followed its own particular path. The research priorities in any given moment were always a place of encounter between top-down requirements of the company’s directorship, and bottom-up thematic trajectories. The CRA’s organizational history gives us unique insights into broader tendencies in chemical research in the second half of the 20th century, such as specialization of laboratories, introduction of market-driven research as well as decentralization and multiplication of hierarchies. The case study can be of interest to historians of science, due to the fact that the history of private research centers remains largely understudied, and to science policy scholars who want to understand the interconnectedness of factors that influence the organization of R&D structures in an institution.