Organizer: Reuben Hudson, College of the Atlantic; Julian Silverman
This session offers the opportunity for undergraduate students to contextualize their conference experience by direct engagement with a broad-topic panel discussion. Panelists will kick off the session with short talks designed to provide background and perspective in hopes of addressing general questions that students have gathered throughout the conference. This session is designed to provide a space for undergraduate students (or anyone else) to debrief their conference experience by interfacing with researchers from disciplines spanning catalysis, biomass conversion, systems thinking, solid phase chemistry, and more.
Organizer: Thomas Holme, Iowa State University; Peter Mahaffy, Kings University
Recent publications challenge chemistry professionals to transform chemistry so that it addresses emerging global challenges. Common themes in these calls for transformation include the integration of systems thinking into the practice of chemistry and a wholesale reimagination of chemistry education to more effectively educate scientists and citizens to prepare them for their roles in a rapidly changing planet and society. This technical session will report on and guide efforts to reimagine chemistry education using novel systems thinking approaches throughout educational programs
Systems thinking emphasizes the interdependence of components of dynamic systems. In the context of chemistry, systems thinking moves beyond isolated consideration of reactions and processes to consider where materials come from, how they are transformed and used, and what happens at the end of their life span. It draws attention to a need to balance the benefits and impacts of chemical substances and the role they play in societal and environmental systems. Applied to STEM education, systems thinking describes approaches that move beyond fragmented and reductionist knowledge of disciplinary content to a more integrated and holistic understanding of the field. A framework for using systems thinking in chemistry education places learners at the center of a system of chemistry education, suggesting tools and approaches to help instructors and curriculum developers see interconnections among the different components that are part of the learning of chemistry. Teaching chemistry through a systems approach challenges students to apply scientific principles to solve real-world problems, demonstrates chemistry’s role as an essential science in finding solutions to global challenges, and prepares future scientists for the collaborative interdisciplinary work required
Elements of systems thinking have helped to drive developments in green and sustainable chemistry education. The successful application of the principles of green chemistry and engineering, the effective use of tools such as life-cycle analysis, and the development of novel molecular design strategies depends on considering the interconnectedness of reactions and processes with local and global systems. Building students’ capacity to integrate systems thinking into their chemistry problem-solving toolkit can yield new insights and create new opportunities for design and innovation. These strategies and approaches can help to stimulate and inspire further work and research more broadly within chemistry education in promoting and enhancing students’ systems thinking skills as well as a deeper and more interconnected understanding of chemistry and related disciplines as a whole.
This session will review and explore the scope and definition of systems thinking in chemistry education, as well as educational research and practice oriented by systems thinking approaches. It will also include a strong focus on the application of systems thinking to green and sustainable chemistry education and seeks to include interdisciplinary perspectives that can drive innovation in this area.
Organizers: Thomas Holme, Iowa State University; Peter Mahaffy, Kings University
The concept of incorporating context to help motivate student interest in and learning of chemistry has a rich history. While there are efforts both in the US and internationally to develop chemistry curricula in terms of such context-based learning, these efforts have often been directed outside of the curriculum that students intending to become chemists take. In such major courses, such as General Chemistry and Organic Chemistry, context still finds its way into the classroom, but it is arguably less broadly organized and therefore more strongly dependent on specific interests and specialties of individual instructors.
At the same time, recent efforts organized through the auspices of IUPAC have begun to call attention to the possibilities of enhancing student exposure to systems thinking within the chemistry curriculum. Systems thinking emphasizes the interdependence of components of dynamic systems. In the context of chemistry, systems thinking moves beyond isolated consideration of reactions and processes to consider where materials come from, how they are transformed and used, and what happens at the end of their life span. It draws attention to a need to balance the benefits and impacts of chemical substances and the role they play in societal and environmental systems. Applied to STEM education, systems thinking describes approaches that move beyond fragmented and reductionist knowledge of disciplinary content to a more integrated and holistic understanding of the field.
The expansion of context-based learning into systems thinking represents an important way to think about how students learn to use their chemistry knowledge. Significant advantages for the teaching and learning of green and sustainable chemistry is possible by such a merging of the two ideas for including content that extends chemistry beyond the classroom or the lab bench. This workshop is designed to allow participants to first identify ways in which they have incorporated context-based approaches in their own teaching. It will then present exemplars of how such contexts can be woven into a systems thinking approach, making use of systems visualization tools such as System-Oriented_Concept_Map-Extensions (SOCME), illustrating how to help students zoom out from the scope of what might be traditionally covered to see cross-cutting dimensions and interconnections with green chemistry and engineering approaches and broader societal and environmental considerations.. Finally, participants will have opportunity to work through exercises that connect prior experience with context-based learning to a larger system context.
Organizers: Edward Brush, Department of Chemistry, Bridgewater State University; Grace Lasker
The chemistry enterprise must play a central role in addressing the grand challenges of sustainability. This requires a paradigm shift in chemistry education by integrating and scaffolding green chemistry principles and systems thinking throughout the traditional undergraduate chemistry curriculum, including a multidisciplinary context provided through connections with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). There have been numerous concerted efforts to bring these topics into the chemistry curriculum through the: Green Chemistry Roadmap Project, ACS Exams Institute’s Anchoring Concept Content Maps, ACS-CPT Green Chemistry Supplement, IUPAC-STICE group, and Journal of Chemical Education Special Issue on Systems Thinking and Green and Sustainable Chemistry. It is now time for the chemistry education community to come together and leverage these remarkable efforts by outlining a chemistry curriculum that integrates and scaffolds systems thinking, green and sustainable chemistry and the UN SDGs throughout the chemistry curriculum, providing students with the skills and vision to contribute to a sustainable future through chemistry. This symposium will include a combination of invited and contributed talks and an imbedded workshop. The participants will be contributing to a paradigm shift in chemistry education by outlining draft learning goals, content and assessment for a 4-year curriculum that integrates and scaffolds green chemistry, systems thinking and the UN SDGs.
Organizers: Se Ryeon Lee, Research Group Leader, PPG; Kristin Nuzzio, PPG; Chad Landis, PPG
Customers are increasingly aware of the environmental impact of products they buy and use. As a response to this, a major driver in industrial innovation is sustainability to fulfill both customer needs and anticipate regulatory changes. This session will focus on highlighting industrial product design and process development with respect to sustainability, which may include energy savings, cost savings, water reduction, solvent reduction, sustainable feedstocks, and lowering CO2 emissions. Presentations describing specific examples or case studies of successful product development and/or challenges involved with commercialization are particularly welcome.
Formulating high-performance consumer products using green and sustainable chemistry approaches requires the development of innovative, effective components that possess little or a reduced toxicity profile, the potential for ready degradability after use, no potential for bioaccumulation, and an overall increased sustainability profile. This session is intended to provide a forum to share case studies and success stories of green and sustainable chemistry approaches to more sustainable ingredients used in formulated household and personal care products. A few of the ideas to be addressed include:
Descriptions of raw material innovations and how these may be formulated into products
Compelling examples of creating value through new chemical innovation that facilitates increased sustainability performance
Examples of how trends in ingredient disclosure has driven new chemical development
Examples of how systems thinking is used in chemical development to enhance positive benefits passed on to consumers and the environment
Research groups working in the following categories highlighted by the ACS GCI Formulators’ Roundtable’s 2015 Green Chem. publication, and prioritized by the Roundtable, are intended to be the main speakers in this session:
Antimicrobials
Surfactants
Solvents (for use in formulated household and personal care products, not for synthesis)
Chelants and sequestering agents
**This is intended to primarily be a graduate student session. Students accepted to speak in this session will receive a travel award, provided by the ACS GCI Formulators’ Roundtable.** Get the details of the Travel Awards here.
Everyone else submitting an abstract for this session will be reviewed as part of normal abstract submission process.
For about two decades, there have been significant efforts to develop new commercial processes to bio-based and renewable chemicals as platform molecules. These offer a rich source of novel molecules and can serve as alternative building blocks in the synthesis of raw materials and intermediates that are currently sourced through petrochemical supply chains. Consequently, bio-based and renewable chemicals offer the potential for more sustainable manufacturing systems that will advance the circular economy in a variety of industrial sectors.
This symposium will create a conversation about technologies that have been used to commercialize bio-based and renewable chemicals, how these technologies could be considered “more sustainable” than the existing ones, and what are the next steps to improve them.
• Alternative molecules to be used as building blocks/raw materials
o Implications of using oxygenated or highly functionalized molecules as are routinely found in nature as building blocks vs. the use of highly reduced molecules
• Feature examples of novel and innovative technologies that create value and enables greater sustainability performance.
o Which technologies are currently commercialized and what has contributed to their success in the market?
• Examples of how systems thinking has been used to enhance positive benefits that may be passed on to businesses and consumers.
Organizers: Beau Hoffman, Technology Manager, US Department of Energy Bioenergy Technologies Office, and Inge Johansson
In 2012, the World Bank estimated that around 1.3 billion tonnes of municipal solid waste (MSW) is generated each year globally, and it is estimated that will rise to 2.2 billion tonnes by 2025 due to increased urbanization in developing and emerging economies. These statistics illustrate that these waste streams are available in abundant quantities today and often pose significant environmental challenges. Amongst OECD countries, waste management practices and infrastructure vary considerably due to legislative policies/frameworks, costs of landfilling, and significant changes in recycling practices such as Asian restrictions on foreign plastics. Moreover, while it is technically possible and commercial technologies exist to convert these waste streams into power and/or heat (e.g. using anaerobic digestion, incineration), margins on these end products are often too thin to manage these wastes at an economy-level. These, as well as other factors, has created the need for alternative strategies for managing these waste streams: namely the production of higher value biofuels and biochemicals from MSW.
As a result of these differing policy and societal factors, R&D and process development must be aligned to meet near- and long-term challenges. To this end, this symposium will explore two of these areas:
International Perspectives on the Availability and Opportunity of Wastes as Feedstocks
This portion of the program will focus on non-technical elements regarding the feasibility of producing fuels and chemicals from waste such as resource availability and costs. It will also discuss local, national, and regional policies that are influencing which waste management needs are most pressing.
Technological Success Stories for the Conversion of Waste to Fuels and Chemicals
This portion of the program will feature technological case studies for the conversion of waste streams. In addition to discussing the innovative conversion processes being developed or demonstrated, the invited talks will also include discussions of techno-economics and/or life cycle analyses associated with their process Technologies and processes that are at the piloting phase or beyond and are thus poised to make a near term impact will be showcased during this portion of the program.
Organizers: Peter Deuss, Adelina Voutchkova-Kostal, Vikram Yadama, Jason Locklin
Morning Concentration: Feedstock processing and catalytic pathways to new products
Afternoon Concentration: Renewable feedstocks to biopolymers and biocomposites
Lignocellulosic biomass in the form of agricultural and forest-based residues is poised to become a key carbon source to displace fossil carbon resources in the chemical industry. The economically viable implementation of biomass-based refineries (biorefineries) will rely on (i) access to high value products; (ii) maximum valorization of all products streams, including residues and (iii) efficient and robust component separation and conversion with adequate pre- & post-processing steps. The ability to maximize feedstock utilization and the value of the outputs will be critical to making lignocellulosic feedstocks a feasible carbon source. In order to design applied materials that incorporate the principles of green chemistry, synergistic partnerships between researchers and business communities are critical.
Example topics include: Technologies to breakdown biomass to access separately carbohydrates and lignin; Depolymerization of lignin and carbohydrate components to new platform chemicals; Catalytic conversion of platform chemicals to high value chemical products; Challenges in process integration, scaling up and conversion of residues to for example fuels and overall life cycle assessment. The afternoon will continue the conversation from the morning and add additional topics further down the supply chain including development of building blocks from renewable feedstocks for bio-based chemicals, biobased polymers, biocomposites, degradation and compostability of biobased products, and LCA and Techno-Economic Assessment of bioproducts.
The symposium will end with an interactive panel, which will discuss the business challenges and opportunities for the production of renewable products. Here current hurdles and knowledge gaps will be identified to allow a discussion on the way forward in this key field of technological development.
The Green Chemistry Challenge Awards are now in their 24th year and continue to recognize leading green chemistry innovations. Since the inception of the awards more than two decades ago, EPA has received more than 1600 nominations and presented awards to 118 technologies. These exemplars create a compelling case that innovations benefitting from the application of green chemistry and engineering have achieved sufficient commercial success to justify implementation in all chemical processing sectors. This session will seek to celebrate winner’s innovations and inspire future award nominations. The symposium will work to bring award winners from the last two years (2018 and 2019), in addition to the winners from the 2020 awards cycle.”