Feature pubs.acs.org/journal/ascecg
Green Chemistry Education: 25 Years of Progress and 25 Years Ahead Julie A. Haack* Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403-1253, United States
James E. Hutchison* Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403-1253, United States ABSTRACT: This Feature summarizes the advances in green chemistry education during the last 25 years and highlights some new strategies being developed to support curricular reform at the undergraduate level. The infusion of green chemistry into the curriculum has enabled educators to improve lab safety, address facilities limitations, and modernize the chemistry curriculum. Strategic partnerships and investments in rapid dissemination and capacity building supported the development of early educational materials and the development of networks of educators interested in collaborative efforts to transform chemistry education. The first section illustrates the breadth of the achievements of the educational community and highlights approaches that provide inspiration for the development of successful educational materials and resources. In the second section, we take stock of the current state of green chemistry education, examine the drivers that are creating pull for further infusion, and describe a roadmap for green chemistry education to guide the field for the next 2 decades. The infusion of green chemistry into the undergraduate curriculum is critical for future innovations in research and industrial applications that will be needed to meet society’s growing demand for sustainable products and processes. KEYWORDS: Educational materials, Education roadmap, Curriculum, Laboratory experiments, Lecture materials, Nonmajors education
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approaches that provide inspiration for the development of successful educational materials and resources, capacity building and networks.3−10 In the second section, we take stock of the current state of green chemistry education, examine the drivers that are creating pull for further infusion, and describe a roadmap for green chemistry education to guide the field for the next 2 decades.
reen chemistry has become a powerful approach to reducing the hazards of chemicals and their production while maintaining, and improving, the performance required to meet key societal needs. Just as green chemistry is changing the practice of chemistry within industry and academia, green chemistry education is infusing new concepts and strategies across the chemistry curriculum. These new concepts are critical for future innovations in research and industrial applications that will be needed to meet society’s growing demand for sustainable products and processes.1,2 This Feature will summarize the advances in green chemistry education during the last 25 years and highlight some new strategies being developed to support curricular reform. Although there are a number of efforts to incorporate green chemistry at the K-12 and postgraduate levels, the vast majority of the activity has been at the undergraduate level, which is the focus of this paper. This Feature aims to illustrate the progress, status, and future directions within this area rather than provide a comprehensive review of all of the accomplishments. In the first section, we examine the rise of green chemistry education during the last 25 years, highlighting the motivations for curricular innovation and the strategies for incorporation of new materials. In this context, examples are intended to illustrate the breadth of the achievements of the educational community and highlight © XXXX American Chemical Society
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1996: GREEN CHEMISTRY EMERGES AS A POSSIBLE SOLUTION TO IMPROVE LAB SAFETY, ADDRESS FACILITIES LIMITATIONS AND MODERNIZE THE CHEMISTRY CURRICULUM When green chemistry emerged as a new approach to pollution prevention a little over 25 years ago, the strategies and principles of green chemistry provided opportunities to address key weaknesses of the chemistry curriculum. In 1996, a number of toxic, carcinogenic, and corrosive substances were routinely used in teaching laboratories with large numbers of students Special Issue: Building on 25 Years of Green Chemistry and Engineering for a Sustainable Future Received: August 28, 2016 Revised: October 6, 2016
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the development of a diverse collection of laboratory and classroom materials. To address the challenge of a crowded curriculum, early green chemistry educational materials were designed to replace older content with new examples wherein the concepts, strategies and tools of green chemistry could be highlighted. Adopting new materials represents significant time commitment and inherent risk. Thus, to ease adoption and reduce the risk of failure, early green chemistry laboratory exercises were thoroughly tested and combined with robust supporting information.11−17 In the classroom, modules and case studies, along with premade lecture slides were developed to augment existing lecture topics throughout the chemistry curriculum.18 These built the case for green chemistry in the curriculum as well as taught core concepts associated with the 12 principles of green chemistry. For advanced students, educators developed experiential learning activities such as research projects and/or capstone courses.19−22 During this time, educators learned that when creating new educational materials it was important to describe objectives and outcomes for green chemistry concepts and strategies in the same way that one would define these for core chemistry concepts and skills. In the laboratory, experiments were modified to be safer or greener, and new experiments were developed that could serve as replacements for existing laboratory exercises. In 2001, the NSF funded an effort at the University of Oregon to catalyze the development of a collection of organic laboratory exercises that could be used as individual replacements for traditional exercises or could be introduced as a package to replace a full year’s curriculum. To ensure that instructors felt adequately prepared to deliver new content, and to develop their own materials, the same award funded a weeklong workshop for chemistry educators to test-drive laboratory exercises before incorporating them into their own curriculum. Although publication in the primary literature and in textbooks is an effective dissemination strategy for curricular materials, there were significant lags in reaching the target audience. Thus, the community needed a platform for gathering information and sharing educational materials that were under development. To meet this need, early developers and adopters utilized the Web to highlight and share contributions and to increase the rate of dissemination. These efforts were coupled with an implementation strategy that encouraged educators to leverage the construction of new facilities, emerging personnel changes and existing curricular reform efforts to drive change. Thus, many successful efforts to incorporate green chemistry have been associated with plans to remodel or design new facilities, changes in course requirements, updating curricula or hiring new instructors.
that would never take chemistry courses beyond organic chemistry. Many of the teaching laboratories built decades earlier had inadequate ventilation to protect students from some of the chemicals traditionally used in the introductory general and organic chemistry laboratories. In addition, many of the laboratory exercises that had been conducted for decades no longer represented the types of chemistries used in modern academic or industrial laboratories. Thus, students viewed chemistry laboratories as hazardous and irrelevant. Finally, the costs of waste disposal and construction, and operation of new, heavily ventilated laboratories were taxing university budgets.11 The approach and principles of green chemistry provided a unique opportunity to address most of the challenges faced in the undergraduate curriculum. The use of alternative starting materials, reagents and solvents that possessed lower hazards could enhance safety while reducing reliance on engineering controls such as fume hoods. Decreased reliance on fume hoods could, in turn, significantly decrease the costs of future building construction and operation. In addition, waste streams could be minimized and the hazards related to those wastes reduced. The strategies of green chemistry provided a new context for teaching students the concepts and skills of chemistry that cast the discipline in a more positive light while better preparing students to discover and develop sustainable chemistries to meet society’s needs.
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BARRIERS AND STRATEGIES TO IMPLEMENT GREEN CHEMISTRY IN LABORATORIES AND CLASSROOMS Although the prospect of infusing green chemistry into the curriculum offered an approach to address a number of challenges, several persistent barriers had to be overcome. These included a crowded curriculum with a large volume of essential material, a limited number of educational materials that could be used to teach green chemistry and few educators with the experience or capacity to implement change in the curriculum. As a result, early attempts to incorporate green chemistry into the curriculum were difficult and slow. To accelerate the adoption of new materials, early proponents of green chemistry education developed and utilized several instructor centered design strategies outlined in Figure 1. Initial efforts focused on meeting the needs of educators by designing robust educational materials that could be used to replace traditional content followed by an investment in building capacity and networks that has fueled
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PROGRESS AND PARTNERSHIPS During the last 25 years, educators developed and implemented a robust collection of educational materials that have infused green chemistry into the curriculum. Throughout the early history of green chemistry, strategic partnerships have been instrumental for rapid development and successful implementation. The first collaborative and systematic effort to design and disseminate green chemistry educational materials grew out of a cooperative agreement between the American Chemical Society Division of Education and International Activities and the Environmental Protection Agency in the late 90s. During the two years of the cooperative agreement, the project incentivized a number of individuals with expertise in green
Figure 1. Curricular reform focused on implementing a series of instructor centered design strategies. Early strategies focused on replacing content, followed by sharing resources, tools and expertise that led to educator networks that built capacity among faculty to leverage multiple drivers for change. B
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meetings, the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education, IUPAC, Pacifichem, and Confchem.
chemistry to produce a variety of materials including an annotated bibliography, video, laboratory exercises, and a compilation of lecture modules based on the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge awards.23 Additional cooperative agreements between the two agencies resulted in the generation of a how to booklet for integrating green chemistry into the curriculum,16 a manual with 14 laboratory exercises designed for the undergraduate chemistry curriculum,13 and a multimedia DVD showcasing four presentations given at the sixth Annual Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference in 2002.24 As these materials were being disseminated, educators realized that successful implementation was going to require diverse strategies and approaches tailored to different types of institutions (Primarily Undergraduate Institutions, Research Intensive Universities, and Community Colleges). As a result, peer-to-peer mentoring by early adopters from across the country became an important component of the Green Chemistry in Education Workshops at the University of Oregon. By sharing strategies, networks and experiences, educators were able to design more holistic arguments for the multiple benefits of infusing green chemistry into the curriculum and were thus better equipped to bring green chemistry to their home institutions. As educators continued to collaborate and share information, they wanted to participate in efforts to infuse green chemistry more broadly. The second collaborative project, spearheaded by past participants of the Oregon workshops, focused on developing, testing and disseminating the first searchable database of green chemistry education materials called GEMs (Greener Educational Materials for Chemists).25 GEMs is an interactive collection of chemistry education materials focused on green chemistry. The collection includes laboratory exercises, lecture materials, course syllabi, and multimedia content that illustrate chemical concepts important for green chemistry. Each entry includes a description of the item and is searchable by a variety of parameters, including chemistry concepts, laboratory techniques, green chemistry principles, and target audience. In 2006, the national Green Chemistry Education Network was formed to coordinate collaborative efforts and to increase the capacity of green chemistry educators to transform chemistry education. This led to a second wave of curricular reform. In an effort to bring green chemistry to a broader audience, members of the network partnered with a textbook publisher to infuse novel green chemistry content into a leading introductory chemistry textbook.26 During the same time, educators saw an emerging need for short, local workshops to inspire colleagues in the region to infuse green chemistry into their curricula. Building on earlier efforts by the American Chemical Society in 2000 to infuse green chemistry into the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education (BCCE), educators from across the country collaborated to design, test and deliver a half-day laboratory workshop for the 2008 Biennial Conference on Chemical Education. Designed to provide a “workshop in a box” for implementation by members of the community, the workshop highlighted a core of six laboratory exercises that could be implemented in a variety of learning contexts (general, organic, nonmajors, etc.). These capacity building efforts have been instrumental in creating a diverse community of green chemistry educators that have taken leadership roles in green chemistry education programming for national and regional American Chemical Society
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CURRENTLY AVAILABLE RESOURCES A wide array of educational materials have been disseminated already. One indicator of the progress, and gathering momentum, in this area is illustrated in Figure 2 that shows
Figure 2. Articles describing green chemistry-related educational materials published in the Journal of Chemical Education each year since 1994. Totals include only articles that describe the implementation of green chemistry concepts and strategies in the classroom or laboratory.
the growth in the number of articles on green chemistry educational approaches published in the Journal of Chemical Education since 1994. In 2001, the Journal of Chemical Education initiated a regular feature to raise the visibility of interdisciplinary courses, laboratory experiments, demonstrations, student research, etc. that infuse green chemistry into the curriculum.27 The over 200 papers published likely represent only a fraction of the materials being developed because many of the classroom and laboratory exercises developed by educators for use in their own classrooms are not published. Although initial materials focused on building the case for green chemistry, we have seen a rapid diffusion throughout the chemistry curriculum shifting toward younger audiences with a greater focus on hands on experiences. Today, there are many exercises that highlight the use of the 12 principles of green chemistry in a variety of scenarios. Transformation efficiency is one of the most common chemical concepts used to infuse green chemistry into laboratory and lecture courses across the curriculum. By controlling transformation efficiency, chemists are able to reduce waste and materials usage and minimize the impacts of chemical transformations on human health and the environment. The learning goal is to enable students to apply a variety of metrics, including yield, atom economy, and process mass intensity, to gain insight into multiple facets of transformation efficiency. There are also case studies that seek to infuse green chemistry into lecture courses, often by highlighting work carried out by the winners (or applicants) of the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards.28,29 Perhaps the largest collections of materials include new experiments for the general and organic chemistry laboratories, particularly in the latter case where a couple of texts have been published.13,30−33 In the organic laboratory, a wide array of new experiments and exercises has been developed. These include more benign ways to transform molecules (e.g., oxidations, reductions, and C−C bond formation), safer reagents, reactions, and extractions using alternative solvents or under solventless conditions.13,30−33 Numerous examples now illusC
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Green chemistry often aligns with their personal ethics regarding stewardship of the environment and gives them an opportunity to protect the planet from undesired impacts of chemistry. The fact that green chemistry aims to meet societal needs for chemical products without causing unintended harm to health or the environment engages students who may have previously seen chemistry as polluting and dangerous. Green chemistry teaches problem solving skills and provides chemistry majors with valuable skills so that they can collaborate with students in business, design, architecture, and the humanities to drive sustainable innovation. The adoption of green chemistry has led to a number of benefits for faculty as well. Green chemistry appeals to faculty for some of the same reasons that students like it: it appeals to their interest in new concepts and chemical strategies that also support their personal ethics related to chemistry and the environment. Because green chemistry is not prescriptive, but principle based, it provides direction and flexibility for faculty to innovate new materials and grow professionally.45,46 The opportunity to improve continuously education materials engages faculty in creative work while keeping the material fresh for students and faculty alike. Academic institutions have accrued significant benefits. Within the chemistry department at the University of Oregon, greener laboratory exercises generate less waste and the waste stream is less hazardous, thus improving safety and reducing cost. In our experience, students conducting laboratory work in a safer setting are more relaxed and engaged with course content. By decreasing the hazards of the materials used, institutions can remodel or build new laboratories that have less need for ventilation, decreasing both capital expense for fume hoods and ongoing energy costs of extensive HVAC systems. In our own facility, energy savings are estimated at nearly $100,000/year. Decreased reliance on fume hoods can also improve communication between students and instructors due to decreased noise and open sightlines. In addition to these practical benefits for institutions, there are other programmatic benefits shared by past participants of the Green Chemistry in Education Workshop. New green chemistry programs have led to improved public relations that have raised the profile of those institutions and increased support from donors. New research areas have spun out of green chemistry education efforts, leading to new federal funding for institutions. Green chemistry has been a powerful recruiting tool at all levels, including undergraduate, graduate, and faculty levels. From an institutional perspective, green chemistry offers an opportunity to engage each of these groups through principle-based curriculum, innovation, and new opportunities for scholarship and research.
trate how the core concepts and techniques of organic chemistry can be implemented using more benign substances while teaching key green chemistry strategies and tools. Educators have also discovered that green chemistry is an excellent venue for guided inquiry or research-based experimentation. There has been development of new educational materials for nonchemistry courses as well. General education courses for nonscience majors have been developed that illustrate the role that chemistry plays in understanding and addressing societal challenges involving sustainability.26,34−38 In addition, a number of interdisciplinary graduate courses, often framed around external projects have been implemented.39−41 Finally, case studies have been developed and presented within a number of business schools to prepare MBA students to understand the value proposition of green chemistry and gain experience working with chemists.42,43 In 1992, a pioneering effort led to the first documented green chemistry course that resulted from infusing environmental concepts into an upper division/graduate course at Carnegie Mellon University.19 Today, a nationwide network of educators has developed a robust collection of journal articles, textbooks, case studies, and videos along with classroom/laboratory exercises. As summarized in Figure 3, materials are available
Figure 3. Instructor-centered sources of green chemistry education materials. The most comprehensive collections of these materials are available via the ACS Green Chemistry Institute Web site.44
via databases and free online collections curated by regional hubs and organizations. In addition, a variety of metrics have been converted into tools and apps to not only measure and document improvements but also meet the information needs of next generation chemists and educators.44
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BENEFITS The infusion of green chemistry into the curriculum has been an effective tool to improve student and faculty engagement while providing a variety of institutional and programmatic benefits.11,35 Combining these benefits with improved safety and waste reduction in the teaching laboratories inspired early adopters to tackle the challenge of developing and implementing green chemistry in their courses. The opportunity to connect the benefits of a greener curriculum to multiple stakeholders has been effective in generating a broad base of support for these changes. Within the discipline, students are engaged by the opportunity to work toward solving some of the grand challenges of sustainability through the use of chemistry.
ADVANCES DURING THE LAST 25 YEARS AND UNMET NEEDS There has been considerable progress in green chemistry education during the last 25 years. Hundreds of new educational materials have been published, thousands of faculty and their academic institutions have been engaged, and hundreds of thousands of students have learned about green chemistry. At the same time, the demand for green chemistry and more sustainable approaches to green chemistry appears to be increasing in the private sector according to a report by Pike research in 2011 and scientific leaders1,2 are calling for fundamental changes in the practice of chemistry. In addition, new research centers47−53 and programs have been funded to D
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ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering drive research on green and sustainable chemistries and new journals54 launched to disseminate these efforts. Yet, there is still concern that the sustainability problems presented to society and the planet require better solutions, and faster. What can be done to address this concern? If we focus on curricular reform in the organic chemistry teaching laboratory, sufficient educational materials have been developed, but adoption is lagging. Through our experiences leading the Green Chemistry in Education Workshops, engaging with faculty at ACS-sponsored meetings and working with a broad stakeholder group to build a more unified strategy for curricular reform, several barriers emerge. One is the lack of uniform demand or pull for green chemistry from academic and industrial stakeholders. Second is the resistance to infuse green chemistry into the main general and organic chemistry textbooks or the ACS standardized exams. Without such demand, it becomes less likely that instructors will modify their curriculum given the extra work involved in making these changes. Others who are motivated to adopt may not have the expertise to implement green chemistry. Although some workshops (such as our GCEW) and those presented at national meetings have been helpful to build capacity, such efforts need to be scaled to cover a wider range of topics than is currently available. Finally, although there are many educational materials available, there are also key gaps in terms of content and assessment. Content gaps include molecular-level design of molecules with reduced toxicity, comparative approaches to select a greener alternative from existing alternatives, and transformations to transform efficiently alternative feedstocks into desired products.
Creating more pull also involves expanding the audience for green chemistry education. The UO’s Tyler Invention Greenhouse59 and UC Berkeley’s Greener Solutions program41 are creating extended opportunities to engage diverse groups of students and community members in ways that both tap their expertise and prepare them to partner with chemists to help drive innovation in green chemistry. Berkeley’s Greener Solutions program is a project-based course that partners interdisciplinary teams of graduate students and advanced undergraduates with local businesses, nonprofits or government agencies to advance green chemistry solutions. The advantage of this program is that it provides a real-world context for promoting the adoption of more sustainable chemistry and can provide the foundation for fundamental research.60 The UO Tyler Invention Greenhouse is bringing together artists, designers, chemists, and entrepreneurs into an intellectual maker space that provides a launch pad for the next generation of green businesses. Teaching students how to integrate green chemistry, design, and entrepreneurship at the point of invention has the potential to significantly improve the success and accelerate the adoption of sustainable products into the market. Finally, several efforts have emerged to increase demand for green chemistry in education and in the workplace through commitments to green chemistry education and hiring practices in industry. The Green Chemistry Commitment involves a collaborative effort among chemistry faculty at US colleges and universities to make a public commitment to implement and assess the infusion of green chemistry and toxicology into the curriculum.61 In the workplace, corporate members of the Green Chemistry in Commerce Council are working to create demand for graduates with “a demonstrated knowledge of and ability to utilize the principles of green chemistry and sustainability”.62
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CREATING MORE PULL Green chemistry is often characterized as a driver for innovation; this is creating a new pull for educational materials and learning experiences that integrate green chemistry with other disciplines such as product design, policy, business, and marketing.55 Novel interdisciplinary courses,34−38 specialized degree and certificate programs,56 and design challenges are popular among students. It is the opportunity to “design” solutions that is inspiring students to see chemistry as a partner in creating a more sustainable future. For chemists to meet effectively the needs of society for sustainable new products and processes, they will need to collaborate with engineers, designers, communicators, and policy and business experts to design, produce, and implement greener chemical products. Productive collaborations are dependent on an individual’s deep understanding of how multiple perspectives can benefit the innovation process. Thus, students need more extended opportunities to practice using green chemistry as a tool to design more sustainable consumer products. Design challenges provide students with a rich opportunity to create solutions that address grand challenges of sustainability. The first program of this type to actively engaged students interested in green chemistry was the People, Prosperity, and the Planet (P3) Student Design Competition launched by the EPA in 2002.57 In 2016, the Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference sponsored a workshop where interdisciplinary teams of chemistry, engineering, and design students were challenged to use the principles of green chemistry to design a comprehensive strategy for overcoming the environmental and social challenges associated with materials used to generate color in consumer products.58
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GREEN CHEMISTRY EDUCATION ROADMAP During the last 25 years, leading educators have developed and implemented green chemistry across the curriculum. Although much has been accomplished, the needs and interests of individual educators rather than a more systematic approach have driven efforts to reform the curriculum reform. As a result, there are gaps in the content available to support green chemistry in the curriculum and these are expanding rapidly as the state-of-the-art in green chemistry practice is advanced. For example, the value of being able to integrate an understanding of toxicology to optimize the design of individual molecules that maximizes performance and minimizes hazard or to design chemical systems for industrial applications that address innovation, economics, and supply chain issues are just now emerging.63 The ability to connect chemistry education to the needs of a variety of stakeholders including students, faculty, employers, and society speaks to its overall relevance as a tool for sustainability. To address these emerging needs for new content and assessment, a roadmap is being developed to coordinate efforts to recognize, anticipate, and design the curriculum needed to support green chemistry in the future.64 Roadmaps have been successfully used to guide the development of new technologies65,66 and educational67 initiatives by providing distinct milestones for achievement, articulating steps needed to reach those milestones, and organizing the efforts of the stakeholders involved. Thus, a green chemistry education roadmap will be an enduring, multiyear strategy to anticipate, define, and solve key challenges E
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to successful infusion of green chemistry into the curriculum. Educational materials have been developed for use and implemented in the classroom and laboratories. New generations of faculty have been trained and are able to infuse green chemistry into their courses. Faculty and institutions have seen the benefits of incorporating green chemistry into their curricula. More recent efforts have focused on new courses and experiential activities that demonstrate the value of green chemistry approaches and enhance the “market pull” for green chemistry. Finally, a roadmap is being developed that will help guide and coordinate future educational innovation to maximize the impact of educators’ efforts and meet the needs of students, institutions and companies as they strive to address society’s increasing demand for more sustainable products and solutions. Although there has been considerable progress made toward infusing green chemistry concepts, strategies and tools into the modern chemistry curriculum, there is a lot left to do. There is a significant opportunity to enhance the stature of chemistry within society by addressing key questions at the intersection of society, chemistry, and the environment. How do we design the next generation of chemicals and products so that they provide the benefits that consumers want without causing harm to health or environment? How can chemists tap a wider range of feedstocks beyond our traditional petrochemical sources? Can we discover new reactions or reaction conditions that significantly enhance the efficiencies and reduce energy demands for chemical production? How can we choose the best chemicals, processes and products in the context of the lifecycle impacts involved? These questions provide exciting and important opportunities for chemists, and their partners in engineering, business and design, to design and implement new solutions at the molecular level. Educators will play an essential role in preparing students to tackle these challenges and to disseminate the new discoveries to the next generation of molecular innovators.
in green chemistry education. It will identify key gaps in the curriculum and provide direction for coordinated efforts by the community to address those gaps. Because roadmaps set forth a series of milestones that are successively more demanding, there is the opportunity to improve continuously green chemistry education. If the products of the roadmap enable students to contribute to better and more sustainable products, the roadmap may be an opportunity to build unprecedented academic−industry partnerships. Finally, a coordinated effort among chemistry educators, green chemists and engineers, and industrial partners will give funders more confidence in the success of these programs and should lead to increased funding in green chemistry education. Thus far, the American Chemical Society Green Chemistry Institute has convened visioning and roadmapping workshops to engage stakeholders from academia and industry.68 Through this process, the group is beginning to identify core competencies for students to develop to meet the long-term needs in green chemistry. These relate to (i) designing or selecting chemicals with enhanced product and environmental performance, (ii) developing new syntheses and reaction processes with enhanced efficiency, (iii) integrating chemicals into products or formulations to increase performance and reduce impacts across the lifecycle, and (iv) decision-making in the face of uncertainty or multiple trade-offs. Although the roadmapping process is still in progress, several gaps are evident already. Examples of these gaps include safe design of chemicals informed by toxicology and environmental impact, metrics and tools to evaluate and compare chemicals and chemistries, and methods and approaches to examine the benefits and impacts of chemistry within systems. It is also recognized that educational materials developed based upon the roadmap should incorporate the best pedagogical practices, e.g., active learning, and be based upon well-defined learning objectives, outcomes, and assessments. Fortunately, there is pioneering work already taking place to address the gaps in the curriculum described above. These efforts can be leveraged as the initial version of the roadmap is completed. For example, the Molecular Design Research Network (MoDRN)69 has been developing educational materials to help chemists consider health and environmental impacts in the design of new molecules. The Pharmaceutical Roundtable of the ACS Green Chemistry Institute has been developing and disseminating tools for reagent and solvent selection and calculators for Process Mass Intensity.70 Educators have been developing educational materials that introduce life cycle thinking and some are building the case for introducing systems thinking into the chemistry curriculum.71 Finally, in 2015, the Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference sponsored it’s first workshop focused on learning outcomes and assessment entitled Creating Learning Objectives that Infuse Green Chemistry and Engineering into the Curriculum.
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Authors
*J. A. Haack. Email:
[email protected] Tel.: 541-346-4604. *J. E. Hutchison. Email:
[email protected]. Tel.: 541-3464228. Notes
The authors declare no competing financial interest.
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REFERENCES
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CONCLUSIONS Green chemistry is emerging as a powerful driver for change in the chemistry curriculum. Although change in a mature curriculum like chemistry is slow, green chemistry is transforming the way that chemistry is being taught at hundreds of institutions around the world. Over the past 10 years, multiple stakeholders have emerged with a vested interest in transforming the chemistry curriculum. Purposeful development of educational materials, capacity building, and online resources and networks have been the key F
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DOI: 10.1021/acssuschemeng.6b02069 ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX