Green Chemistry and Sustainability in Undergraduate Laboratories: Asking Students to Think More Broadly About Their Experiments

The theme of the 2023 GC&E, “Closing the Loop: Chemistry for a Sustainable Future”, implies that the broader chemistry community should be considering what a sustainable future looks like. While researchers (in both industry and academia) have been moving toward more systems thinking approaches to their work, undergraduate students don’t yet have the knowledge or skills to assess what closing the loop involves. Therefore, to leverage chemistry to achieve a more sustainable future, students need to be trained to think broadly about the experiments they perform in the teaching laboratory. Where do reagents come from? Where does waste go for disposal? What makes one protocol greener than another one?

This symposium will feature talks and discussions relevant to the process of training students in systems thinking, life cycle analysis, green chemistry, safety, and similar tools through methods such as guided inquiry, comparative analysis, research-based methods, case studies, etc. We invite a diverse spectrum of practitioners and viewpoints to share what they have done to invest in a sustainable future by training our students in undergraduate laboratories to think about how they play an important role as future scientists.

Organizers

Glenn A. Hurst, Associate Professor of Chemistry Education, University of York
Dr. David Laviska, ACS Green Chemistry Institute
Prof. Barbora Morra, University of Toronto
Jane Wissinger, Distinguished Teaching Professor, University of Minnesota