Paul Anastas stood before an audience and showed pictures of women protesting for the right to vote, advertisements of doctors recommending cigarettes and engravings of people using leeches to cure diseases.

“It taxes our imagination to understand how they could have ever been adopted as fact,” Anastas said of women at one time being considered incompetent to vote, suggested health benefits associated with smoking and the use of leeches as a medical remedy.

Anastas believes that future generations will feel the same way about our present damaging environmental practices.

“I thoroughly believe we can and we must undergo a transformation that will take us off the unsustainable trajectory we are on,” Anastas said.

Anastas served as the speaker at Tuesday evening’s 2012 Heinz Distinguished Lecture in the William Pitt Union Ballroom. The event attracted about 200 people. The annual Heinz Lecture, sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, brings a speaker to campus each year to discuss issues related to environmental engineering.

Between 2009 and 2012, Anastas was assistant administrator and science adviser for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He also held leadership positions in the EPA during the Clinton and Bush administrations. He currently holds a professorship at Yale University and serves as director of the Yale Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering.

Anastas concentrated a large portion of his lecture, titled “Designing Tomorrow,” on what he considers an underexplored area of sustainability: reducing toxicity in our environment.

“Very small attention is paid to reducing toxicity,” he said. “Chemical products should be designed to preserve efficacy of function, while reducing toxicity and other environmental hazards. Choosing the next-least bad thing off the shelf is not the same as designing the properties and chemicals that you want.”

Anastas said reducing toxins from the world must involve a collaboration of chemists, engineers, toxicologists, biochemists, ecologists and environmental scientists.

He added that more efforts need to be made to predict potential toxicity in a chemical before it is created. New research in chemical toxicity shows that properties of chemicals can serve as predictors of toxicity. As an example, Anastas put up a diagram showing that when a set of tested chemicals had less solubility and a greater value for a factor of reactivity, they proved less toxic.

Anastas said that just as chemists can design chemicals to be either blue or red, brittle or elastic, soon they will be able to design chemicals to be more or less toxic.

Despite the negative environmental trends on display in the world today, Anastas emphasized that he remains optimistic for the future.

Anastas presented an entire screen of sustainable breakthroughs brought about through green chemistry, including alternative energy and degradable polymers.

“Green chemistry has not grown to where it is because you generate a little less waste. It happened because of innovation — new science, new technology.”

Anastas encouraged the audience members to focus their energies on innovative projects instead of retreading old ground.

He shared the story of a friend who was receiving accolades for his work with polaroid cameras when digital cameras were coming out.

“Merely because you’re doing excellent work doesn’t mean you’re working on the right thing. It doesn’t mean you’re changing the world.”

During a question-and-answer session that followed the lecture, a man asked Anastas about his thoughts on the government’s environmental regulatory measures.

“Regulatory measures are critical, essential, but not enough,” Anastas responded.

Anastas said that in his experience, governmental regulatory measures for the environment lead companies to ask how environmentally abusive they can be and still be on the right side of the law, rather than working to improve the environment.

“Creating a floor is not the same thing as creating a race to the top.”

Eric Beckman, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering who asked Anastas to speak at this year’s event, said the goal of the speech was to fire up undergraduates about the possibilities of green science.

The lecture achieved its objective with at least one student.

“It reminded me to be optimistic,” senior Grace Meloy said. “I have a big issue with that, as an engineer. It’s good to remember there is hope. We have the power.”