No one ever bought a chemical.  They bought function or performance.  They wanted the service the chemical provided. With that realization, a metric, F-Factor, has been developed to recognize and quantify the desire to achieve maximum function with the minimal amount of chemical used.

 

 

 

 

This approach has been expanded in the discussions of the chemical equivalent of Moore’s Law.

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The desire is for the value of F to be as large as possible by increasing the functional performance and/or decreasing the amount used to achieve some functional performance.  This drives the system toward ideality where you get all of the function of a chemical or product without the existence of a chemical or a product; the chemical analogy of getting the function of the telephone without the need for telephone wires on every street.