Formulation Chemicals

Over the past few years the word chemical has taken on some very negative connotations. Apart from being difficult to define, the word all too often generates the wrong images in people's minds and is the source of the current chemophobia.

There are some among the anti-chemicals lobby who create confusion by promoting the idea that chemicals are nasty man-made substances, damaging to humans, animals and the environment and that we should use natural materials that are both healthy and environmentally friendly.

Such messages are unhelpful and foster in the minds of the non-scientists notions that there are natural substances and there are chemicals and the two are totally different things. This is unfortunate but we might expect those with only a basic knowledge of chemistry to see the flaw in it. Sadly this is not the case for even those with a scientific background can be confused.

I asked some A Level chemistry students: What is a chemical? There was an instant response that went something like this: 'Dangerous substances like acids, poisonous gases, pesticides and other stuff that damages the environment'. So, where do we go from there?

It is my view that any text on chemicals or applied chemistry has a duty to acknowledge those fears, put things in a true perspective and hopefully bring about some reassurance. And to do this it is essential to be absolutely clear as to what a chemical is.

Even if this goes only as far as explaining that the whole of the material world is atoms, produced by nature billions of years ago, chemically bonded together to produce the millions of molecules that are us and our world. It does not matter whether the bonding together of those atoms was done by nature or by man.

Good old alcohol is a prime example. The ethanol molecules produced from sugars by the catalytic effect of enzymes in yeast cells, a natural process, are indistinguishable from ethanol molecules made by man in the catalytic reaction between steam and ethene (ethylene). The water molecules exhaled by us as one of the waste products of our metabolizing carbohydrates, fats and proteins are no different from those exhaled by our beloved cars as they gobble up hydrocarbons in their infernal combustion engines.

It has to be accepted that not all man-made chemicals are a good thing just as not all nature-made chemicals are a good thing. Nature's chemical factory can come up with some treacherous substances capable of horrendous damage to the environment and living systems.

Some man-made chemicals have no analogues in nature and these are the ones that need to be watched carefully as, once they are done with and despatched to the environment, they do not always fit happily into nature's recycling mechanisms. The chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that damage the ozone layer are a recent example of this. Many of those molecules that are man-made, but are not straight copies of nature-made ones, we would not like to be without. Take for example the modern anaesthetics. What sort of surgery could be carried out without them?

We have gone a long way down the road to synthetic living. In fact our very bodies are now partly man-made. Those protein molecules that form a major part of us have nitrogen and hydrogen with chemical bonds that were made in chemical works in the Haber synthesis of ammonia. The ammonia so made is then used to make fertilizers which then make plant protein which we eat – directly or via animals – and incorporate into our tissue. Yes, we are partly synthetic.

For the purpose of this text I shall regard a chemical simply as a single substance (element or compound) with a definite and fixed composition that can be expressed precisely by means of a formula whether or not the substance is natural or man-made.

In classifying a chemical as natural, man-made or somewhere in between there is a need to examine its origin and any changes it has been subjected to before it is put to use. Take for example gum arabic, a traditional thickener in chemical formulations, which is entirely natural. The lumps of resinous material are a carbohydrate gum that is exactly as produced by the acacia tree and with no chemical modification. Man has simply collected it, picked out some contaminating bits of bark and dispatched it to the user. The product is 100% natural.

At the other extreme there is tetrachloromethane, CCl4. This is as man-made as you can get, not one chemical bond from a natural substance exists. Most chemicals fall somewhere in between these extremes in that they retain at least some of their nature-made structure. An example of one of these 'in between' compounds is sodium oleate, CH3(CH2)7CH:CH(CH2)7 COONa, a type of soap made from vegetable oil and sodium hydroxide, NaOH. In the molecule the carbon chain, CH3 (CH2)7CH:CH(CH2)7CO, is unaltered; it is the ONa that is due to our chemical technology.

The amount of natural content can be quantified by means of simple calculations based on molecular mass. For sodium oleate the natural component amounts to 87%. This is a highly simplified way of assessing substances and no regard is made of the other factors, like the production of the sodium hydroxide, that are essential to the manufacturing process.

It may be that a molecule comes out at over 80% nature-made content but its 20% man-made part involved so many other chemicals that it fares less well than a molecule of a mere 10% nature-made content. This is to say nothing of the energy aspects of the environment/resource equation. The foregoing may be a rather crude instrument but it is a useful exercise in our efforts to focus upon more natural chemicals; it will also be helpful when we consider 'cradle-to-grave' analysis in Chapter 5.

Some chemicals used in formulations are petroleum based and are obtained simply by separation processes such as distillation. As such they retain their natural structure and in this respect they are natural substances but, in contrast to the oleate (above) which is made from vegetable oil, they are not from renewable resources.

In considering the worthiness of a chemical as an ingredient in a preparation the chemist of today must at least pay some attention as to whether it is from renewable or non-renewable resources. Unfortunately, however hard we work to avoid the use of petroleum it will still play a part somewhere in the process – at least for the foreseeable future.

In the discussions on chemicals that follow there will be frequent reference to some relevant chemistry theory. This has been kept to the minimum required for an understanding of the types of formulations discussed in this book.

CHEMICAL NAMES

There are over one hundred thousand chemicals currently in use but this represents only a small fraction of those that are known. In fact, the total number of chemical substances registered with the Chemicals Abstract Service is over 18 million and new ones arrive...