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Chlorine

Chlorine is a powerful oxidizing agent – in other words, it steals electrons from neighbouring atoms.

This property makes chlorine an excellent bleach for everything from your laundry to the wood pulp used to make paper, but these bleaching processes also produce chlorine-containing pollutants.

Scientists at the National Research Council Canada (NRC) have recently developed an enzyme that works as a "helper" to chlorine bleach so that pulp and paper mills need much less. Using this enzyme, Canadian mills have already cut chlorine-compound discharges by 100 tonnes per year.