How social scientists are helping our chemistry research consortium become more sustainable

At the June 2025 annual meeting of NCCR Catalysis in Zurich, we asked everyone in the room to scan a QR code and spend 45 minutes answering questions about sustainability practices in the field of chemistry. Not about developing better catalysts, reactions or processes, but about how researchers incorporate different dimensions of sustainability into their everyday work, and what would help them do more. 

Eighty-eight participants, spanning different disciplines and career stages within the consortium, contributed around 900 free-text answers. The exercise generated a paper in Green Chemistry, highlighting barriers to sustainability beyond the lab. Here, we offer a complementary perspective: how the exercise came about, what it took to run it from inside a consortium dedicated to sustainable chemistry, and what it can – and cannot – tell us.