Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews Introduction to Green Chemistry edited by Mary Ann Ryan and Michael Tinnesand American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2002. viii + 68 pp + CD-ROM. Wirebound. ISBN 0-8412-3848-0. $16.95 (ACS members), $19.95 (non-members), $13.50 (30 or more copies) from ACS Education Products, 1-800-2275558 reviewed by Wheeler Conover
Every spring, my thoughts turn to… you guessed it, waste pickup. I listen politely as my system’s safety officer tells us to list exactly what waste we have so the costs can be kept as low as possible. Then I inflate the amount of waste we have so the college doesn’t get stuck with 25 boxes of light bulbs or 50 pounds of mercury for another year. Microscale chemistry and eliminating sources of waste such as the traditional qualitative analysis schemes only go so far. ACS (in cooperation with the Royal Society of Chemistry and Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker) has produced a short manual with laboratory activities and background information that has an emphasis on reducing waste. The book is divided into six units, each discussing a principle of green chemistry. At the end of the book The Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry can be found. These include using ambient temperatures and pressures for reactions and to design syntheses that incorporate as many process materials as possible in the final product. It seems that the six unit themes are summaries of the twelve principles. However, it strikes me that if this is a book about green chemistry, shouldn’t all of the principles be listed in the beginning?
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By doing so, one could discuss how each principle is addressed in the fun syntheses and analyses contained in the manual. Neither the mathematics nor the chemistry is difficult, making it suitable for high school chemistry or general science classes, college ecology classes, or any introductory chemistry course. While the editors list the experiments as being inquiry-based, it seems to me that the directions provide far greater detail than those normally found with inquiry-based experiments. However, the questions after each activity do lend themselves to a discussion of inquiry-based science. The book comes with a CD-ROM that contains the entire book, a PowerPoint presentation about green chemistry, and another PowerPoint presentation in black-and-white that can be used to make transparencies or handouts. To me, the only benefit of having the book on CD-ROM is to copy certain lessons without having to turn pages; the green chemistry presentation is useless to me. However, I would use the black-and-white file to make handouts and transparencies for my class. This manual cannot be used to replace a chemistry text for a “consumer chemistry” course. However, it would make a good lab manual for the course, and it would also make a good manual for an inquiry-based science education course. (The best way to teach conservation to future generations is to teach it to our teachers.) In the meantime, we need to use reagents that are not only safer, but that will actually be used in the laboratory—so a safety officer won’t need to scream about disposal of reagents that have sat on the shelf for a decade or more. Wheeler Conover teaches chemistry at Southeast Community College, 700 College Road, Cumberland, KY 40823;
[email protected].
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 80 No. 3 March 2003 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu
