C G Green Chemistry August 1999 G87 O B I T U A R Y It is with great sadness that we have to report the death on 19 July 1999 of Joe Breen—one of the Editorial Board members of Green Chemistry. Only a short time ago, on the evening of 28 June 1999, in the Great Hall of the National Academy of Sciences, Joe was presented with the Distinguished Service to Green Chemistry Award from the President of the American Chemical Society.For the hundreds of people in attendance that evening, many of whom participate in the Green Chemistry research, education or industrial applications, the award was welcome and deserved recognition for a driving force in the development of Green Chemistry. As inscribed on the award itself, Joe Breen was recognised for his ‘extraordinary leadership and tireless efforts in the advancement of Green Chemistry globally through research, education and outreach’.Joe Breen was the executive director of the Green Chemistry Institute and served as the Chair of the Committee on Environmental Improvement of the American Chemical Society. In both of these roles Joe promoted green chemistry as a new and innovative approach to environmental protection. The decade of the 1990s has seen green chemistry develop from its inception and infancy into a growing recognised area with activities around the world.In these years Joe Breen was a leading ambassador for the expansion of green chemistry. He was a founding member of the editorial advisory boards of the journal, Green Chemistry. As a co-chair of the Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference, Joe guided the conference to demonstrate the broad applicability of green chemistry throughout academia, industry and government.Joe’s interests consistently centred on breaking down barriers through the use of green chemistry. Green chemistry knows no borders was a centrepiece of Joe’s approach as evidenced by his almost evangelical tours which spread the word of green chemistry across national boundaries.One could just as easily find Joe addressing a group of industrial chemists in Oakash (Wisconsin) or Eire (Pennsylvania) as addressing researchers and students in Hefei (China), Venice (Italy) or St. Petersburg (Russia). Joe Breen’s twenty years in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) helped to inform him on exactly how important and urgent Green Chemistry is at this stage of the environmental movement.During his time at EPA, Joe was involved in the many regulatory aspects of the Toxic Substances Control Act including playing a major part in the EPA’s Lead Program. He won the Agency’s highest honour, the EPA Gold Medal, for designing and implementing the ‘Test Our Kids for Lead’ Program and was co-editor of the book ‘Lead Poisoning: Exposure, Abatement and Regulation’.But while valuing the impacts and necessity of regulatory command-and-control approaches to cleaning up the waste of the past, Joe Breen was more interested in looking forward to the future. With the passage of the Pollution Prevention Act of 1990, Joe focussed his efforts on the prevention of waste before it is ever generated by the proper design of the process in the first place.In 1993, the book ‘Pollution Prevention in Industrial Processes: The Role of Process Analytical Chemistry’ by Breen and Dellarco illustrated how process analytical chemistry can prevent the formation of undesirable by-products and parasites before they accumulate. In 1995, Joe Breen organised the Design-for-Environment symposium at the American Chemical Society Meeting in Washington D.C.with over 140 speakers on Green Chemistry and related topics. It would be the first of many symposia that Joe organised and/or participated in. Because of his strong desires to support educational activities, Joe devoted considerable time and effort to teaching green chemistry at such diverse locations as Trinity College (Washington D.C.), Hood College (Maryland) and the Venice Summer School on Green Chemistry in Italy. A major project that Joe was recently involved in is the incorporation of Green Chemistry principles into the popular ACS chemistry textbook Chemistry in Context.The importance of green chemistry to achieve the goals of industrial ecology was a central theme of Joe Breen’s work.One of the illustrative examples that Joe played a major role in promoting is the use of supercritical and liquid CO2 in the area of garment care. From funding of basic research (during his time both at EPA and as Executive Director of GCI) to promoting and catalyzing industrial and academic interactions in this area, Joe served as a conduit in bringing this industrial ecology technology from the lab bench to commercial fruition. Joe will be sadly missed by his friends and colleagues within Green Chemistry and beyond. In 1998, he published a paper in the Journal of Cleaner Production entitled “Green Chemistry and Design for Environment: The Heart and Soul of Industrial Ecology”. From the contributions that Joe Breen has made to Green Chemistry it is easy to see why his colleagues often refer to him as “the heart and soul of green chemistry”. Paul T. Anastas, Chief, Industrial Chemistry Branch, Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics, US EPA, Washington, USA. Joe Breen— heart and soul of Green Chemistry