Campus as a Living Laboratory for Sustainability: The Chemistry

Jun 29, 2017 - For the past five years, the approach of utilizing campus-based content was employed by the authors in teaching an introductory environ...
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Campus as a Living Laboratory for Sustainability: The Chemistry Connection Timothy Lindstrom and Catherine Middlecamp* Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of WisconsinMadison, 550 N. Park Street, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, United States S Supporting Information *

ABSTRACT: In the undergraduate curriculum, chemistry and sustainability connect easily and well. Topics in chemistry provide instructors with opportunities to engage students in learning about sustainability; similarly, topics in sustainability provide instructors with opportunities to engage students in learning chemistry. One’s own college or university campus is a useful source of content related both to sustainability and to chemistry. To obtain this content, instructors must seek out and learn from those working in campus facilities and operations. For the past five years, the approach of utilizing campus-based content was employed by the authors in teaching an introductory environmental science course. This paper describes three topics from this course that general chemistry instructors can use to help students make connections to sustainability: the carbon cycle, the carbon footprint, and the energy required to heat water. These topics are presented with the hope that instructors will use them with data from their institutions, utilizing their own campus as a “living laboratory” for sustainability. KEYWORDS: First-Year Undergraduate/General, Environmental Chemistry, Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary, Applications of Chemistry, Nonmajor Courses

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BACKGROUND: SUSTAINABILITY AND THE CHEMISTRY CURRICULUM In the past decade, several publications have highlighted the role of sustainability in the chemistry curriculum. For example, “Chemistry for a Sustainable World” was the theme of the 239th national meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) held in San Francisco in 2010. At this meeting, the Division of Chemical Education (CHED) hosted a two-day symposium called “Sustainability in the Chemistry Curriculum: What, Why Now, and How?” A monograph with the same title in the ACS Symposium Series was released a year later.4 Four years later, at the 248th national meeting of the ACS held again in San Francisco, CHED hosted another sustainability symposium with the title “Teaching and Learning about Sustainability”. Each ACS technical division was invited to send a speaker. Several recipients of the ACS-CEI award for the Incorporation of Sustainability into Chemistry Education contributed to the talk by the speaker from CHED.5,6 So did two authors of papers on sustainability in this Journal.7,8 In 2016, another book in the ACS symposium series was released.9 Finally, sustainability-related content has been finding its way into chemistry textbooks, especially those for nonscience

ne of us is a physicist. The other is a chemist. For the past five years, we have been teaching a large introductory environmental science course at our university. With its informal title of “Energy, Food, and Trash”, this course uses the daily activities of campus citizens (e.g., turning on lights, using hot water, eating meals, and tossing trash into a bin) to provide a context for exploring sustainability. More broadly, the course fits in the genre of using one’s campus as a “living laboratory”, a term discussed in a later section. This course also counts toward an undergraduate certificate in sustainability.1,2 In teaching this course, we did not park our disciplinary affiliations at the door; rather, we placed the contributions of our fields squarely in view of our students. By doing so, we became more aware of the strong contributions that physics and chemistry make to the teaching and learning of sustainability. At the same time, we began noticing how sustainability makes strong contributions to each of our disciplines. For chemistry instructors, this paper offers three topics that connect chemistry and sustainability: the carbon cycle, carbon footprints, and heating water. For physics instructors, a similar paper is in press that uses the kilowatt-hour as an example of a topic that connects physics and sustainability.3 © XXXX American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.

Received: August 18, 2016 Revised: May 1, 2017

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majors. For example, Chemistry in Context, a project of the ACS, engages students in learning chemistry though real-world societal issues such as air quality, acid rain, energy, food, and plastics.10 The seventh and eighth editions of this text contained a new chapter, “Chemistry for a Sustainable World”, that is available via download from the ACS Web site.11 Similarly, the liberal arts textbook Chemistry for Changing Times has featured sustainability content for several editions, including the current 14th edition.12

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CAMPUS AS A LIVING LABORATORY FOR SUSTAINABILITY Just prior to 2000, the idea of using campus as a “living laboratory” appeared in the literature in connection with sustainability. The premise behind the phrase was 2-fold: (1) college campuses function as microcosms of society, and (2) the integration of teaching, research, and operations related to sustainability can engage students in environmental stewardship in both purposeful and practical ways.13−15 The living laboratory approach is motivated by a growing understanding that learning is not confined to a classroom: “The campus is the most readily available laboratory for handson projects, and acts as a shadow curriculum for the students to apply to the campus what they learn in the classroom.”16 As reported by Cohen and Lovell in The Campus as a Living Laboratory, “When students are able to practice concepts learned in the classroom, they are more engaged, comprehend material better, and develop skills desired by employers.”17 Moreover, by situating projects within the context of the campus, students can become active agents for influencing policy and decision-making which often creates a lasting sense of personal investment in the ongoing sustainability story of their campus.18,19 On a campus, the living laboratory approach requires collaboration across two traditionally separate worlds: academics and campus operations.20−22 These collaborations challenge faculty members to interact with a new set of colleagues, often with offices in a distant part of campus.23 For example, our collaborations led us to the campus heating and cooling plant to meet with utility engineer Jeff Pollei. He had firsthand knowledge of how six natural-gas-fired boilers generate the high-pressure steam (800 PSI) distributed via an underground tunnel system to heat campus buildings; similarly, he could explain how two immense chillers worked to generate chilled water to cool buildings and equipment. Prior to teaching our environmental science course (see next section), Pollei familiarized us with the heating and cooling plant, allowing us to photograph its boilers, chillers, pollution control equipment, and water purification systems. Once the course was up and running, each semester he hosted our students at the plant (Figure 1), ending his tour with a climb to the roof to examine the stacks. The living laboratory approach also requires faculty members to learn new content. For example, we needed to learn the basics of how our campus was heated and cooled, including the fuels, the pollution controls, the use of nearby lake water, and the underground steam and chilled water distribution system. We were not conversant with kilowatt-hours and megawatts, units of campus energy and power, respectively. Similarly, we were not fluent in carbon footprints and able to think in terms of grams or kilograms CO2e, units described in a later section of this paper. As both authors readily acknowledge, the answers to campus sustainability-related questions were not in the back of

Figure 1. Via a viewing port, Jeff Pollei shows students the “controlled bomb” of a natural gas boiler. Jeff notes that the flame inside is blue because the gas is burning efficiently at 1600 °F. This boiler can also switch to fuel oil if the natural gas supply is disrupted.

the book. In fact, no book existed to explain to us the energy, water, food, and waste infrastructures required to keep a university campus running. In many fields, the “living laboratory” approach offers instructors the opportunity to integrate sustainability-related content into their courses. Possibilities include courses in schools of business, engineering, public health, agriculture, and natural science.24 The next section describes how an introductory environmental science course utilized the approach, in part by drawing content from topics in general chemistry courses.

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LESSONS FROM AN ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE COURSE Taught by the authors, the course “Principles of Environmental Science” fulfills the campus physical science laboratory requirement and carries four credits. Students meet weekly for two 75 min lectures and a 3 h period for campus-based laboratory activities and field trips. Open to all undergraduates, the course has no prerequisites and enrolls first-year students through seniors. With a class enrollment of 100−115 students, the course has been taught for five consecutive academic years, most recently in Spring 2017. By nature, environmental science is an interdisciplinary field, drawing content from chemistry, physics, geoscience, and biology. This interdisciplinary approach is evident in the course description: “... we position ourselves with our feet on the UWMadison campus and ask questions about the energy we use to heat and cool our buildings, the food we eat, the air we breathe, the electricity to run light bulbs and appliances, the goods we purchase, and the waste we create.”2 This course description also makes clear that “Principles of Environmental Science” utilizes content from where students learn, live, and work: the UW-Madison campus. The course is divided into three units of roughly equal length: energy, food, and waste. Utilizing the campus as a “living laboratory”, the majority of course content is drawn directly from data provided to the instructors by workers in the campus unit of Facilities Planning and Management.25 For example, Jeff Pollei provided data for the campus heating and cooling plant. Similarly, other workers in Facilities Planning and Management provided data about lighting upgrades in campus B

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buildings,26 and those in campus dining provided information about food supply chains. The unit on energy launches by having students examine a recent estimate of the annual campus energy consumption: 5,126,000 MMBTU (MMBTU is 106 British thermal units). This value includes both electricity consumption of 440 million kilowatt-hours and natural gas consumption of 36.2 million therms (therm is 105 British thermal units).27 The director of the campus physical plant visits the lecture hall to help students better understand the meaning of these values. For example, he points out that campus energy use has decreased by 12% in the decade since 2006, in spite of a concurrent increase of 21% in the gross square feet of campus building space. Students examine recently instituted campus energy conservation measures that account for this decrease. Some of the measures were undertaken by physical plant workers, e.g., replacing incandescent bulbs with more energy-efficient fluorescents and LEDs.28 Other measures required action by campus citizens, e.g., setting electronics to sleep mode when not in use. An example of an individual action likely to be relevant to chemistry instructors, using less hot water to shower, is presented in a later section. The course unit on food dovetails with the final unit on waste. Explorations of campus food launch with having students eat a meal at a popular campus eatery and estimate the carbon footprint of their meal.29 Steps in the food supply chain, e.g., production, transportation, distribution, packaging, refrigeration, and meal preparation, are provided by campus dining personnel. Each step in the food supply chain uses energy and creates waste. Each step also has a carbon footprint that can be estimated.30 A later section of this paper describes how students make use of carbon footprints in their explorations of campus energy, food, and waste. The three sections that follow each present an example of using campus as a “living laboratory” that could be adapted for use in a general (first-year) chemistry course. These examples do not offer an exhaustive treatment of the sustainability-related principles and chemical principles involved. Rather, they are intended as starting points from which instructors can incorporate data from their campuses, customizing the material to meet their own needs.

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percentages are relevant to fuel choices on any campus, and will be revisited in the later section on carbon footprints. Table 1. Percent Carbon in Fossil Fuels and Related Compounds Fuel Methane (primary component of natural gas) Ethane Butane (and higher) Anthracite coal

Chemical Formula

% Carbon by Mass

CH4

75%

C2H6 C4H10 N/A

80% ∼83% >90%

The carbon cycle can be used to help students learn the chemistry of carbon, to understand issues relating to sustainability, and to connect both to activities on their own college campus. Carbon cycles have been depicted in many ways, and Figure 2 shows a simplification. Each reservoir in the cycle is a planetary bank of carbon, with physical and chemical processes adding or removing carbon. The arrows represent these additions or removals, showing carbon exchanges among the lithosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere.32 Here are three talking points on the carbon cycle that guided our approach to helping students learn principles of both chemistry and sustainability: (1) carbon is found in many places on our planet, (2) carbon moves from place to place, and (3) which place it ends up matters. The first two points directly connect to chemical principles. The third, building on the previous two points, provides an opportunity to teach sustainability-related content. This section discusses each talking point in turn, with an eye to utilizing information from a local campus environment. Message 1: Carbon Is Found in Many Places on Our Planet

However, in most of these places, including college campuses, the carbon may not easily be recognized by our students. Some compounds of carbon are invisible because they are colorless, odorless, tasteless gases: carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO2), and methane (CH4). Other forms of carbon are not visible because they lie deep below our feet: carbonate rocks and deposits of coal and petroleum. Still other compounds of carbon are in plain sight but vary so widely in appearance that they are not easily categorized as carboncontaining compounds: cellulose, starch, and calcium carbonate. If students are to appreciate how many places carbon is present in the world around them, they need to learn to recognize carbon in the food they eat and the waste they discard. They also need to recognize carbon in the fuels burned in their local environment, including its presence in the waste gases that campus vehicles and heating plants emit. And they need to be aware that a form of carbon is dissolved in any nearby oceans, lakes, or streams. In essence, they need practice “seeing” the many forms of carbon right where they live, work, study, and play.

CHEMISTRY CONNECTIONS: THE CARBON CYCLE If to comprehend is the same as forming an image, we will never form an image of a happening whose scale is a millionth of a millimeter, whose rhythm is a millionth of a second, and whose protagonists are in their essence invisible. Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (from Carbon).31

On every college or university campus, carbon plays a central role. It is a component of the fuels burned to heat and cool buildings, to power campus buses and to fuel student motor bikes. The meals served on campus are a blend of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. And campus waste streams, e.g., paper, plastic bottles, or pre- and postconsumer food waste, are a mixture of carbon-containing compounds. Similarly, carbon plays an important role in every introductory chemistry course. As an element, it is described in the form of graphite, diamond, or soot. As a compound, carbon is central to the study of organic and biochemistry, if not to the study of all life on Earth. Carbon connects to fossil fuels, which range from 75% carbon in methane to approaching 100% carbon in some types of coal (Table 1). These

Message 2: Carbon Moves from Place to Place

In Figure 2, the arrows show how carbon moves via processes such as photosynthesis, respiration, and the solution and dissolution of carbon dioxide in water. Again, these processes present conceptual challenges to instructors as they present this information to students. Some chemical processes involve the C

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Figure 2. Simplified depiction of the carbon cycle. Carbon moves between reservoirs on the planet by many pathways.

These three talking points about the carbon cycle set the stage for another important conversation that connects chemical principles and sustainability issues: energy use on campus.

invisible gases (colorless, odorless, tasteless) of carbon dioxide and oxygen, e.g., photosynthesis and respiration. Others, such as fossil fuel formation, occur over geologic time scales (the slow carbon cycle).33 In contrast, plants, animals, and the atmosphere exchange carbon on a daily basis and contribute to what is known as the fast carbon cycle.34 Burning coal wrenches geologically stored carbon from below the Earth’s surface and converts it into “fast carbon” in the form of carbon dioxide, an invisible gas. If students are to understand the movement of carbon, they need examples that give them practice in “seeing” its journey along these pathways. In addition, they need knowledge of the types of chemical reactions involved (e.g., combustion, respiration, photosynthesis, reactions of acids with carbonates), and they need to be mindful of the different time scales involved for each. Students may not realize how much carbon is moving from place to place on their own campus. For example, burning a gallon of gasoline releases just under 20 pounds of carbon dioxide. How might students estimate the gallons of gasoline burned daily by vehicles traveling a particular route on their campus? Earlier, we quoted the value of 36.2 million therms of natural gas burned annually in our campus heating and cooling plant. How much carbon dioxide does this amount release to the atmosphere? On a global scale, what mass of carbon dioxide corresponds to an increase of one part per million in the atmosphere and how does it compare to campus emissions? We make use of stoichiometric calculations such as these to demonstrate how much carbon is on the move.

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CHEMISTRY CONNECTIONS: ENERGY (HEATING WATER) Of all the topics encountered in science, energy is the one that permeates all walks of life... Hanna Goldring and Jonathan Osborne, Students’ Dif f iculties with Energy and Related Concepts.35

The concept of energy is fundamental to introductory chemistry courses. When students observe the flame of a Bunsen burner, they can feel and see that energy is released in the forms of heat and light. When they use a cell phone, they are utilizing the potential chemical energy stored in the phone’s battery. When they boil water, they must supply energy in the form of heat. Students cannot learn chemistry without learning about energy. In the laboratory, students often are introduced to energy through calorimetry experiments that involve heating or cooling water. These may entail mixing water of different temperatures, determining a heat of reaction run in aqueous solution, or identifying an unknown by its specific heat. Consequently, students can learn that the energy to heat a substance depends upon its mass, specific heat, and change in temperature (Q = mcΔT), coming to appreciate the fact that water has a relatively high specific heat. By design, calorimetry experiments focus students’ attention on a simplified system, i.e., a coffee cup, thermometer, chemicals, and water. As a result, a value calculated in a calorimetry experiment tells an incomplete story. Missing from the story are the electricity and natural gas used to heat the water, to condition the air in the lab, or to keep the room lit. Lacking this information, students may be unaware of the larger energy infrastructure and its role in the campus community and local region. As a result, students may miss issues connecting to sustainability. By including sustainability, chemistry instructors can challenge students to view their everyday activities on campus in a broader context. For example, consider the act of taking a shower. With a thermometer, bucket, and timer, students can use Q = mcΔT to estimate the energy used to heat the water

Message 3: The Places in Which Carbon Ends Up Matter

For example, it clearly matters that carbon ends up in the animals and plants that end up in the meals served on campus each day, ultimately ending up in carbon-containing compounds in our bodies. It also matters that carbon ends up as “waste” sent from campus to the landfill, most often in the form of plastics, paper, or food waste. The cost of transporting this waste and landfill “tipping fees” are part of any campus operations budget. Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere and dissolving in the ocean, driving planetary warming and ocean acidification. If students are to understand carbon’s connection to sustainability, they must learn to “see” the ways in which human activities, including those on their college or university campus, are changing the sizes of the carbon reservoirs. These changes have implications worthy of their attention. D

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(Figure 3). Typical results for our students range from 5 to 12 million joules, depending on the time spent showering and the water temperature.

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CHEMISTRY CONNECTIONS: CARBON FOOTPRINTS Carbon footprint is a lovely phrase that is horribly abused. Mike Berners-Lee, How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything.37

What is a carbon footprint? At first glance, it is simply a number. In his book How Bad are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything, Mike Berners-Lee explains that it is useful to think of a carbon footprint simultaneously as a metaphor and shorthand.37 “Footprint” implies stepping and is a metaphor for the impact of something. “Carbon” is a shorthand either for the mass of carbon dioxide (CO2) or for multiple greenhouse gases normalized to reflect the impact of an equivalent mass of carbon dioxide (CO2e). Carbon footprints, then, are an estimate of the climate change impact of something. Berners-Lee explains “That something could be anythingan activity, an item, a lifestyle, a company, a country, or even the whole world.”37 Today, carbon footprints are a common metric for expressing environmental impacts. As Table 2 indicates, carbon footprint Table 2. Examples of Carbon Footprints from How Bad are Bananas?37

Figure 3. “Zeke”, a student in the course, collects water to measure the flow rate and temperature of his shower. His final energy value was 12.04 MJ.36

Action

Carbon Footprint (CO2e)

Sending a text message Boiling a quart of water Washing/drying a load of laundry Using a cell phone 2 min/day per year Having a heart bypass operation

0.014 g 50−100 g 0.6−3.3 kg 47 kg 1.1 t

values range from a fraction of a gram to metric tons. In our experience, both instructors and students have difficulty making meaning of such values. Grams of CO2e is not a common household unit; even if it were, visualizing a mass of carbon dioxide requires more than a small bit of imagination. Furthermore, greenhouse gas emissions most likely are separated in time and space from what produced them. For example, a light bulb (when lit) does not emit carbon dioxide. Rather, a distant power plant is converting the chemical energy stored in a fossil fuel to electrical energy, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Given this separation, connecting an action to its carbon footprint often requires students to imagine connections through time and space. For anything powered by electricity, the size of the carbon footprint depends on the fuel or fuels supplying the energy to produce the electricity. As shown earlier in Table 1, fuels differ in their carbon content. Carbon-heavy coal emits almost twice as much carbon dioxide per unit energy as natural gas.38 Although fossil fuels remain the dominant energy source for electricity generation in the United States, the fuel mixture varies from region to region (Figure 4).39 Consequently, the carbon footprint for any electrically powered activity depends on where you live. Carbon footprints describe the movement of carbon from one planetary reservoir (e.g., fossil fuel, biomass, soils) to the atmosphere. Accordingly, instructors can use carbon footprints to connect electricity use and the carbon cycle. Admittedly, water heaters in a college residence hall are unlikely to be powered by electricity. But with the assumption that they are, students can quickly estimate a carbon footprint. For example, “Zeke” estimated that the carbon footprint of his 12 MJ shower

The estimates that students obtain for their shower can serve as the basis for further inquiry. For example, if students change the length of their shower or lower the temperature of the water, they can calculate an energy savings. Similarly, if they express the energy in kilowatt-hours or in therms, they can estimate the campus electricity or natural gas utility costs. Another possibility (one currently being pursued on campus) would be to estimate the cost savings for installing low-flow shower heads. Workers in campus operations could provide the cost of labor and materials, so that a payback period could be estimated. With each of these inquiries, students have the opportunity to investigate the energy infrastructure on campus and to ponder the implications of their actions both individually and collectively. In these ways and others that an instructor may select relevant to a particular campus culture or environment, an activity rooted in chemical concepts (energy, mass, temperature, specific heat) can become the basis for linking chemistry and sustainability. Instructors also may wish to connect the energy required to heat water for a shower with the combustion pathway in the carbon cycle. Carbon footprints are one way to make this connection. If students convert their energy value in joules first to kilowatt-hours, and then to units of grams CO2e for a carbon footprint, they can estimate greenhouse gas emissions. The details are in the next section. E

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Figure 4. Fuel mix to generate electricity in the United States depends on local industry and access to resources, as seen by the differences in these three regional pie charts. The charts were reproduced with permission from a national fuel diversity map created by the Edison Electric Institute that sourced data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.39 Copyright 2017 Edison Electric Institute.

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(Figure 3) was 2.3 kg of CO2.40 By mass, carbon dioxide is approximately 73% carbon and 27% oxygen. Therefore, “Zeke’s” actions transferred 0.62 kg of carbon from fossil fuels into the atmosphere.41 With the assumption that he showers daily, approximately 230 kg of carbon are reintroduced annually into the atmosphere after slumbering for millennia in a fossilized state. By utilizing a shower or any activity drawn from a local context, carbon footprints can become part of a larger narrative, one that has connections to fuels, electricity generation, the carbon cycle, and greenhouse gas emissions. These connections offer instructors the possibility of integrating the principles of sustainability with those of chemistry, in the process, providing examples that help students to deepen their learning of both.

ASSOCIATED CONTENT

S Supporting Information *

The Supporting Information is available on the ACS Publications website at DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.6b00624. Course materials (PDF, DOCX)

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AUTHOR INFORMATION

Corresponding Author

*E-mail: [email protected]. ORCID

Catherine Middlecamp: 0000-0001-5661-7614

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Notes

CONCLUDING REMARKS Sustainability is an emerging field, with many institutions now offering certificates, minors, and majors in sustainability, sustainability studies, and/or sustainability science. However, students are not limited to such programs to learn about sustainability. In fact, sustainability can be integrated into the content of many different courses, including general chemistry. In the curriculum, chemistry and sustainability connect easily and well. Topics in chemistry provide instructors with opportunities to engage students in learning about sustainability, and topics in sustainability provide instructors with opportunities to engage students in learning chemistry. By utilizing synergies between the two disciplines, each can reinforce the other. Similarly, energy, carbon footprints, and the carbon cycle connect easily and well. Each topic presents an opportunity for instructors to incorporate data and the stories of workers from their campus into their courses, utilizing where students study and work as a “living laboratory”. By highlighting these connections through carefully selected examples, instructors can help students to consider their own actions, those taking place on their campus, and those in the wider community from the perspective of sustainability.42 One’s own college or university campus is a rich source of content for teaching both chemistry and sustainability. To learn this content, instructors must contact those working in campus facilities and operations, investing both time and effort. For us, the payback on this investment has been sizable, both in terms of what we learned and in terms of the quality of information we have been able to offer to our students. We encourage others to utilize their campuses as a “living laboratory,” thus connecting chemistry to issues of sustainability in the places where students learn, live, work, and play.

The authors declare no competing financial interest.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation under Grant DUE WIDER EAGER 1257496. This grant focused on bringing sustainability to the undergraduate science curriculum across the nation, utilizing local issues, needs, and resources. We thank our students for their willingness to explore energy, food, and trash on campus, including showcasing their personal showering habits. Finally, we thank the many professionals in the UW-Madison Facilities Planning and Management who were willing to serve as our teachers and mentors.

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REFERENCES

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DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.6b00624 J. Chem. Educ. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX