Resumen
The chemical industry provides essential goods we use in our daily lives and key ingredients for many diverse industries. On the other hand, their production and use require serious attention while they may be seriously harmful to local air quality. The Clean Air Act (CAA) and its subsequent amendments regulate the emissions of hazardous air pollutants to protect public health and welfare in the U.S.A. since 1970. This study aimed to assess the impact of CAA on the rate of patenting in the chemical industry. With this in mind, basic chemical utility patents were analyzed to detect the effects of CAA on the patenting activities. Subsequent to the fitting of the ARIMA (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average) model (producing the least square of errors), a significant outlier was detected with the Dixon?s r22 Ratio Test. This outlier was the number of patents granted in 1972. Contextual queries in the text of those patent documents have shown that there was a considerable increase in the patents of chemistry which takes the sustainability relevant terms (air, emission, pollution, etc.) into consideration. It was concluded that companies in the chemistry industry adapted themselves very rapidly to the changes and CAA was an important incentive to create novel technologies.