Laura Hoch
叠.厂.:听Chemistry, The Pennsylvania State University
笔丑.顿.:听Materials Chemistry, University of Toronto
WHAT SHE DOES NOW:聽Material Innovation at Patagonia
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Laura Hoch鈥檚 career began with a murder. Well, not a real murder鈥攁 murder-mystery game staged by her high school chemistry teachers in central Pennsylvania.
鈥淭here would be all these clues, and then you put together a forensic report based on all you鈥檝e been able to find out by analyzing stuff,鈥� she says. 鈥淚t wasn鈥檛 on my radar to be a chemist, but I just had that memory of chemistry being really fun and interesting.鈥�
When she got to college as an environmental resource management major in 2005, that fond memory nudged her into learning about green chemistry. Green chemistry focuses on designing products and processes that reduce the generation and use of hazardous substances.
Hoch went on to design new solar cells at Los Alamos National Lab, and she earned a Ph.D. in materials chemistry, creating devices that convert carbon dioxide into fuels.
Now, Hoch is a material innovation chemist for Patagonia, where she uses chemistry to make sustainable and durable outdoor apparel. Was she always interested in fashion? 鈥淣o, not at all. It鈥檚 still hilarious to me,鈥� she says. But the job fits her like a glove. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a really fun hybrid of like, my nerdy chemistry self and my outdoors self, all with the thread of my environmentalist self.鈥�
Do friends think your job is cool?
I think so, yeah. I feel really lucky. I mean, I literally get to go ice climbing in Scotland for my job. To make products, you have to know how they work. And so some of the coolest experiments I鈥檝e gotten to do are where I get to go out in the field to try a product and see how it works.
Is caring for the environment what motivated your work in chemistry?
Absolutely. I started doing research during my freshman year of college. And that鈥檚 where I kind of got this idea. You can care about the environment, and you don鈥檛 want to have toxic chemicals. A professor showed me that chemistry can actually be the solution to that. If you can design stuff from the beginning to be less hazardous, you don鈥檛 have to clean up pollution in the end.
Does Patagonia use PFAS in their weather-proof clothing?
Yeah, fluorinated compounds are still used pretty widely in the apparel industry. As a company, we鈥檙e committed to getting out of fluorinated chemistries entirely. If it were easy to just flip the switch and be like, 鈥渁and we鈥檙e done,鈥� we would have done that many years ago. But it鈥檚 just really challenging.
How do chemists reduce the environmental impact of the clothing industry?
Eighty percent of the impact is baked into the actual garment itself. A couple years back we partnered with a chemical company using a different type of dye for denim. Because of the different way that it binds to the surface of the cotton fibers, you鈥檙e able to dramatically reduce the amount of water [needed to produce it]. So instead of 5 to 15 rinses and baths that it passes through for a traditional denim dyeing with indigo, it only needed, depending on the shade, like three passes. So there鈥檚 a way that you can be very strategic about a chemistry choice to reduce impact.
How can students approach thinking about chemistry to better聽understand its environmental effects?
I think my favorite way to do it is to pick an object, and then just diagram all the things that go into it so that students can see what things are made of. What they鈥檙e made of is what determines their impact. And so I think that鈥檚 the first step to designing better鈥攊t鈥檚 understanding how things are linked.
What advice do you have for high school chemistry students?
I think with a degree in chemistry, you can do anything. But even if you don鈥檛 get a degree in chemistry, just knowing about it is interesting, because it鈥檚 what underlies our world. It鈥檚 how everything happens!
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