Environment committee  Yes. As a professor and also as an owner of a couple of start-up companies, I've found the same problem, that it's often actually easier to go to the U.S. than to stay in Canada to get further development. There are a number of reasons for that. There are more investors in the U.

Environment committee  Yes, sir, that's right. In a life-cycle analysis, you have to look at pre- and post-consumer. For example, if a—

Environment committee  I have one more comment. If a chemical is green and harmless, but making it is harmful, then that is bad. We have to take that into account.

Environment committee  Yes, that's right.

Environment committee  I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that—

Environment committee  My understanding is it's based on pure chemical and the impact of the pure chemical, and not on the mixture and not on the amount used. If you had a fertilizer that needs very little used but it's a bit more toxic versus one that's not quite as toxic but needs a vast quantity to

Environment committee  Of a product or a process?

Environment committee  Thanks. If you're comparing the new technology to the old technology, what you do is take a look, and you calculate the emissions of every single chemical that's involved in both technologies, including making the materials needed for those technologies. Then you calculate all th

Environment committee  I would suggest that if toxicity reduction this year is your goal, instead of saying the individual chemicals in a formulation or product must have below a certain toxicity per gram, rather say the formulation has to have less than a certain toxicity. If someone's changing from t

Environment committee  I don't think there's such a thing as a toxic chemical versus a non-toxic chemical. All chemicals are toxic, even water. If you drink four litres, you would die of water poisoning. Everything is toxic, but it's a matter of degree. You have to have a surfactant in a surfactant, o

Environment committee  Absolutely. I think the best thing for industrial uptake of technologies is minimization of risk and minimization of legislative complexity. If we have different regulations in Canada versus the U.S., I think that will inhibit uptake of new technologies.

Environment committee  The assistance from industrial partners is extremely important. It's a bit weaker in Canada than in the U.S., because of the lack of industrial partners that are headquartered in Canada, which is a requirement for the federal government's matching funding. But the assistance of t

Environment committee  SDTC helps, but we need to have more incentives for industrial partners to participate. Point four is risk migration. This is when we ban something and have something else which is more damaging take its place. This can be avoided by doing life-cycle analysis of new technologie

Environment committee  Thank you. Just to let you know my background, I'm a professor of green chemistry. My research at Queen's involves waste carbon dioxide and finding uses for waste carbon dioxide in making industrial processes greener, more efficient, and less expensive. My role at GreenCentre

Environment committee  Let's look at the second slide. I want to make sure we're all on the same page in terms of what the meaning is of the words “green chemistry”. Green chemistry is the design of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substan