EPA Green Chemistry Challenge Awards (United States)

These annual awards recognize chemical technologies that incorporate the principles of green chemistry into chemical design, manufacture, and use.

EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention sponsors the Green Chemistry Challenge Awards in partnership with the American Chemical Society Green Chemistry Institute and other members of the chemical community.

Green chemistry is the design of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use or generation of hazardous substances. Green chemistry applies across the lifecycle of a chemical product, including its design, manufacture, use, and ultimate disposal.

Green chemistry reduces pollution at its source by minimizing or eliminating the environmental impacts of chemical processes as well as the hazards of chemical feedstocks, reagents, solvents, and products. This is unlike treating pollution after it is formed (also called remediation), which involves end-of-the-pipe treatment or cleaning up of environmental spills and other releases.

Categories

• For the 2025 competition, there are six awards categories, with a specific environmental benefit category to recognize green chemistry technology that can prevent or reduce greenhouse gas emissions:
  • Focus Area 1: Greener Synthetic Pathways
    • This focus area involves designing and implementing synthetic pathways or processes that minimize environmental impact from a lifecycle perspective. The use of green chemistry and/or lifecycle metrics are expected.
  • Focus Area 2: Chemical and Process Design for Circularity
    • This focus area involves designing greener chemicals and materials that have both function and a viable path for reclamation and reuse after the product has reached end-of-life of primary use. The latter would theoretically possess physiochemical characteristics that keeps substances out of landfills. The products should be made and managed in a manner consistent with the principles of green chemistry and engineering, and the energy, materials and reagents used to recirculate should be quantitated.
  • Focus Area 3: Design of Safer and Degradable Chemicals
    • This focus area involves designing and implementing functional chemicals and materials that minimize or eliminate hazardous substances or provide avenues for improved degradation into non-toxic degradants. The evaluation of different types of hazards to humans, and the environment or the rates of biodegradation are expected.
  • Specific Environmental Benefit: Climate Change (for a technology in any of the three focus areas that can prevent or reduce greenhouse gas emissions)
  • Small Business (for a technology in any of the three focus areas developed by a small business)
  • Academic (for a technology in any of the three focus areas developed by an academic researcher)

Award Information

• EPA will notify winners prior to the official public announcement, which will be made in fall 2025. EPA will present a commemorative award to the primary sponsor(s) of the winning green chemistry technology in each of the six award categories and certificates to individuals identified by the primary sponsor(s) who contributed to the research, development, or implementation of the technology.
• Award winners will also be required to present their winning technologies in a special session at the next ACS Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference.

Eligibility Criteria

• Companies, individuals, academic institutions (including state and tribal universities), non-profit and not-for-profit organizations and their representatives are eligible for Green Chemistry Challenge Awards for outstanding or innovative source reduction technologies. Members of the federal government, including U.S. departments, agencies, and laboratories are not eligible to receive this award. However, they can be a partner in the research as long as they are not the nominee.
• To be eligible for an award, a nominated technology must meet the scope of the Green Chemistry Challenge Program by meeting each of these six criteria:
  • It must be a green chemistry technology with a significant chemistry component.
  • It must include source reduction.
  • It must be submitted by an eligible organization or its representative(s).
  • It must have a significant milestone in its development within the past five years.
  • It must have a significant U.S. component.
  • It must fit within at least one of the three focus areas of the program.
• Green Chemistry Technologies
  • Green chemistry technologies are extremely diverse. As a group, they…
    • Improve upon all chemical products and processes by reducing negative impacts on human health and the environment relative to competing technologies
    • Include all chemical processes: synthesis, catalysis, reaction conditions, separations, analysis, and monitoring
    • Make improvements at any stage of a chemical’s lifecycle, for example, substituting a greener feedstock, reagent, catalyst, or solvent in an existing synthetic pathway
    • May substitute a single improved product or an entire synthetic pathway
    • Benefit human health and the environment at any point of the technology’s lifecycle: extraction, synthesis, use, and ultimate fate
    • Incorporate green chemistry at the earliest design stages of a new product or process
    • Employ a significant change in chemistry, although they may also incorporate green engineering practices.

For more information, visit EPA.