Merck’s DOZN Green Chemistry Tool Named Top Product of the Year

Mer­ck announced that it won a Top Prod­uct of the Year award from Envi­ron­ment + Ener­gy Leader for its DOZN sys­tem, a quan­ti­ta­tive tool that eval­u­ates the rel­a­tive green­ness of chem­i­cals and chem­i­cal process­es against the 12 Prin­ci­ples of Green Chemistry.

“Our DOZN™ sys­tem is enabling the glob­al sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty to make data-dri­ven deci­sions to increase the envi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­i­ty of the sec­tor,” said Jef­frey Whit­ford,  head of sus­tain­abil­i­ty and social busi­ness inno­va­tion and brand­ing at the Life Sci­ence busi­ness of Mer­ck. “This recog­ni­tion fur­ther con­firms the impor­tance of quan­ti­ta­tive tools that make data actionable.”

The Envi­ron­ment + Ener­gy Leader Awards cel­e­brates excel­lence in envi­ron­men­tal, sus­tain­abil­i­ty and ener­gy man­age­ment. The win is an indi­ca­tion that the program’s judges con­sid­er Merck’s DOZN™ tool a top exam­ple of the exem­plary work being done in the envi­ron­men­tal man­age­ment field.

Merck’s DOZN™ sys­tem has more than 300 active, reg­is­tered users rep­re­sent­ing some of the most pres­ti­gious names in the aca­d­e­m­ic world, gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tions and busi­ness-to-con­sumer com­pa­nies. The tool has been cit­ed in 17 papers since its May 2019 launch.

Chemists and sci­en­tists look for sus­tain­able options in the lab, such as recy­cling gloves and using green­er pack­ag­ing. How­ev­er, they may not think about the impact of green chem­istry and often face the chal­lenge of eval­u­at­ing the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of a chem­i­cal or process. Merck’s DOZN™ tool pro­vides a con­sis­tent and reli­able frame­work for mea­sur­ing the green­ness of chem­i­cals and process­es. It also rais­es aware­ness for sci­en­tists and com­mu­ni­cates the envi­ron­men­tal improve­ments for prod­ucts labelled as green­er alter­na­tives. Prod­ucts receive an aggre­gate score based on a scale of zero to 100, with zero being the most desired.

The DOZN™ sys­tem instructs cus­tomers how to cal­cu­late scores for prod­ucts that the com­pa­ny does not offer and allows cus­tomers to  car­ry out mean­ing­ful research while pos­i­tive­ly con­tribut­ing to their own envi­ron­men­tal impact goals.

Mer­ck plans to expand the appli­ca­tions of the tool, includ­ing the imple­men­ta­tion into cur­ric­u­la at aca­d­e­m­ic insti­tu­tions to fur­ther increase the adop­tion of quan­ti­ta­tive met­rics in green chemistry.