Green chemistry teaching: Belarusian view through world tendencies

1. Changing the Course of Chemistry 2. Using Green Chemistry to Enhance Faculty Professional Development Opportunities 3. The Garden of Green Organic Chemistry at Hendrix College 4. Integrating Green Chemistry Throughout the Undergraduate Curriculum via Civic Engagement 5. Integrating Green Chemistry into the Introductory Chemistry Curriculum 6. Greening the Chemistry Lecture Curriculum: Now is the Time to Infuse Existing Mainstream Textbooks with Green Chemistry 7. Green Analytical Chemistry: Application and Education 8. Linking Hazard Reduction to Molecular Design: Teaching Green Chemical Design 9. Integrating Green Engineering into Engineering Curricula 10. Green Laboratories: Facility-Independent Experimentation 11. Student-Motivated Endeavors Advancing Green Organic Literacy 12. K-12 Outreach and Science Literacy Through Green Chemistry 13. Green Chemistry Education: Toward a Greener Day

In 2015 the United Nations declared a framework comprising 17 aspirational goals known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which was meant to be adopted by governments, industries, and other stakeholders worldwide to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that all people live with peace and prosperity by 2030. It can make the environment sustainable, in other words. Chemistry can play an essential role in helping society achieve the SDGs and Green Chemistry (GC) specifically may be a key player in this regard. GC complements other streams of chemistry, including environmental chemistry. Environmental Chemistry is the ‘chemistry of the environment’ that explains nature and the impact of man on nature. At the same time, GC is ‘chemistry for the environment’ i.e., more environmentally friendly chemistry. GC may be defined as “invention, design and application of chemical products and processes to reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances”. New chemical research, green and sustainable chemistry education, green and sustainable chemical manufacturing practices, and a sense of social responsibility are critical for all chemists worldwide as we work together to protect our planet Earth. SDGs including Zero Hunger, Good Health and Well-being, Clean Water and Sanitation, Affordable and Clean Energy, Industries, Innovation and Infrastructure, Responsible Consumption and Production, Climate Action is directly related to chemistry at large and GC in precise. Therefore, if we rightly practice GC, it serves the purpose of environmental sustainability and will be useful in achieving the SDGs, which will ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity in the long run. Green Chemistry Education is quite important in this regard, which needs to be practiced more and more.

Green chemistry as a leadership opportunity for toxicology: we must take the wheel.

ABSTRACTNowadays, the environment protection and the personal health and safety are given more consideration in the field of chemistry, thus resulting in an increased number of published researches about how to work according to green instructions, to follow up the recommendations of environmental agencies and to obtain better clean handling of chemistry. In this review, green chemistry definition, importance, principles, and some recent applications in the field of green chemistry were discussed. In addition, the review summarizes the evolution of green analytical chemistry (GAC) with its specific principles and how to make the analytical process more environmentally benign with special emphasis on recent applications of GAC. Moreover, the green chromatography, its methods, and some of its applications were outlined. Finally, different techniques available up till now for the assessment of greening of the methods were also presented.

We commend O’Brien, Myers, and Warner for their pioneering work identifying chemical threats to human and ecosystem health and for advancing the field of green chemistry. In our article (Wilson and Schwarzman 2009), we discussed advancing green chemistry as an objective of chemicals policy and described existing policy barriers that, if lifted, would spur the scientific and commercial development of green chemistry. O’Brien et al. recognize that the science of green chemistry has a role in informing chemicals policies. We would add that public policy that accurately reflects current science—and the needs of the chemicals market—is instrumental to the widespread adoption of green chemistry, but dispute that green chemistry is integral to chemicals policy itself. Green chemistry’s potential is expanded when the science is embedded in a larger context. For example, in an introductory text on green chemistry, Lancaster (2002) stated that Green chemistry is not a new branch of science, but more a new philosophical approach that underpins all of chemistry and has technological, environmental and societal goals. Lancaster (2002) pointed out that “over the last ten years, green chemistry has gradually become recognized as both a culture and a methodology for achieving sustainability,” and that the “12 principles of green chemistry help show how this can be achieved” (Lancaster 2002). This book addresses technical aspects of green chemistry while acknowledging the economic, legal, and knowledge barriers to advancing green chemistry. California has adopted a similarly expansive approach. The state’s 2-year old Green Chemistry Initiative is rooted in the 12 principles of green chemistry, and it also embraces a range of tools to ensure the success of green chemistry in society. These include new regulatory strategies, economic incentives, technical assistance, research, and education, with the goal of “launch[ing] a new chemicals framework and a quantum shift in environmental protection” (Adams 2008). These are the same kinds of legislative and regulatory tools that California has used successfully to promote innovation in the energy sector, and which the empirical evidence has identified are the primary drivers for the adoption of cleaner technologies (Nameroff 2004). It is in this context that we see the broad potential of green chemistry. It is a credit to those who have established the field of green chemistry that multiple interests recognize its value in achieving environmental and economic sustainability, with benefits for worker health, resource conservation, environmental justice, public health, and global warming. As a result, green chemistry is reaching out from a core set of technical principles to inform broad societal goals. As the field of green chemistry garners increasing attention in the scientific community and in society, it is worth recognizing that the 12 principles of green chemistry will be put to use in many contexts. We welcome the opportunity to join others in engaging with this promising field, with its relationship to the environmental health sciences and its role in effective public policy.

This chapter reviews how the barriers have been tackled with the green aspiration level (GAL), and exemplifies the new methodology with Pfizer's Viagra and Boehringer Ingelheim's Pradaxa manufacturing processes. The use of GAL together with the Green Scorecard provide a harmonized metrics system that could be used to predict the greenest of chemical processes not only for drugs, but also advanced intermediates and raw materials. Green chemistry metrics have used by industry to track and improve performance in their internal supply chain operations. The initial considerations for environment in synthetic planning, and thus the first environmental green chemistry metrics, can be traced to Trost and Sheldon who went beyond synthesis design and assessed efficiency through Atom Economy (AE) and Environmental impact factor (E factor). The Green Analytical Chemistry (GAC) concept emerged from the field of green chemistry with intent to motivate development of analytical methods that minimize solvents and hazards, and maximize operator safety.

Environmental issues are increasingly of global concern. The trend of sustainable development requires chemistry to be “clean” or “green.” In the 1990s, therefore, the concept of “Green Chemistry” was proposed, together with the “Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry.” These twelve principles encompassed the premise of green chemistry but mainly focused on the aspects of synthetic chemistry. For green chemistry in the analytical laboratory, the concept of Green Analytical Chemistry was subsequently proposed, but it has not yet become a popular field of chemistry. Apparently, green analytical chemistry is a key part of green chemistry and an important trend in analytical chemistry in modern society. It is an emerging area of increasing importance both in green chemistry and in analytical chemistry. In this report, green analytical chemistry is systematically discussed and then defined with seven principles. Firstly, the aspects of green analytical chemistry are discussed in detail with regard to the whole analytical process; i.e., from sample collection, sample preparation, to sample analysis, and some other related issues such as process analysis. Secondly, some naturally green or possibly green analytical techniques are discussed. Presently, spectroscopic methods dominate the area of green analytical chemistry. The purpose of this report is to arouse more attention to green analytical chemistry to serve the sustainable development of the modern society.

Recent years have seen a disheartening string of revelations in which everyday items once considered safe—food packaging, toys, clothes, furniture, electronic components, and many more products—are found to contain carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, and other harmful chemicals.1 Growing demand for healthier alternatives, already seen in food production and housing construction,2 is also happening at the building-block level of manufacturing, where so-called green chemistry represents a revolutionary change in preventing pollution and health problems starting at the chemical design stage. Many industry and government entities are beginning to espouse the principles of green chemistry on their websites and in public statements. Now comes the task of crafting policy to put those principles into action. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines green chemistry as “the design of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use or generation of hazardous substances. Green chemistry applies across the life cycle of a chemical product, including its design, manufacture, and use.”3 Green chemistry also aims to mitigate the type of uncertainty Alan Gold-berg, a professor of toxicology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, recently described to The New York Times: “I can get [toxicity] information on only 20 percent of chemicals we interact with on a daily basis.”4 Of that 20%, he now says, he may be able to find information on overt toxicity for about half, but for details on specific effects such as developmental neurotoxicity, the figure shrinks toward zero. So what does green chemistry look like? Consider the example of pregabalin, the active ingredient in the neuropathic pain drug Lyrica®. Pfizer developed an alternative green-chemistry process that converted several steps of pregabalin synthesis from use of organic solvents to water. That reduced both health hazards and production heating requirements. With the new synthesis, waste from the process dropped from 86 kg of waste per kg product to 17 kg, and energy use dropped by 82%.5 Proponents say that’s how the field can offer a win–win–win solution: good performance, lower cost, and less environmental impact—what Richard Engler, program manager of the EPA Green Chemistry Program, calls the “triple bottom line.” For many, a standard is a logical next step. “At some point you have to go beyond a definition and principles,” says Engler. “I think that’s something the standard will enable.”

Research on green chemistry in education is always evolving. Existing studies found that incorporating green principles into undergraduate education has significant benefits. In addition to the growing interest in green chemistry among researchers, a lot of literature evaluations on green chemistry have been conducted during the past ten years. This study presents the results of a bibliometric study of 444 articles on green chemistry in education from the Scopus database in the last two decades until 2022. The literature on green chemistry has previously been mentioned in an article published in 2021 about green and sustainable chemistry education (GSCE) in mainland China. This study was conducted to see research trends on green chemistry and its implementation in education for the last two decades (2002-2022) comprehensively. Based on the analysis’ findings using VOSviewer software, the most cited documents were written by Alfonsi, Tobiszewski, and Clark. The Journal of Chemical Education is the most prolific publishing source followed by the ACS Symposium Series and Physical Sciences Reviews. The nations having the most publications are the US, Canada, and the UK. Regarding the writers who contributed the most in this field are Dicks, Eilks, and Machado. The keywords most often used are “green chemistry”, “sustainability” “laboratory instruction” and “hands-on learning/manipulatives”.

An educational workshop is proposed for undergraduate students in chemistry to consciousness-raising about their environmental responsibilities as future chemists. Since 1990s, green or sustainable chemistry has been implemented mainly in research [1]. However, the green chemistry principles are particularly relevant in industry and education, since they are focused on reduction/removal of reagents and dangerous residues, decreasing the energy consumption in chemistry processes and methods. In fact, UNESCO stablished the Decade of Education in Sustainable Development during the period 2005-2014. Since pedagogy on green chemistry can be the most effective way to awareness-raising to future scientific, teaching and professional community; this matter should be taken into consideration in the curricula of undergraduate students. Green chemistry teaching can be a challenge due to the complexity of sustainability factors involved, as well as socio-economic considerations [2]. In this sense, different metrics that evaluate the greenness of a chemical process can be used to conduct different activities and develop values and attitudes among students. Specifically, it is proposed the use of analytical eco-scale, developed by Galuszka et al [3]. In order to apply the eco-scale, the didactic methodology of workshop was used to seek the active participation of students. The planning followed included an introduction to green chemistry, the establishment of agreed objectives with the students, group activities for case studies, presentation of activities results, evaluation and conclusions. In particular, students evaluated some analytical methods from the point of view of green chemistry, applying the eco-scale. This tool awards penalty points according to type and volume of reagents, required instrumentation, used energy and generated residues. The reached value on the eco-scale is calculated as 100 minus the sum of the individual penalty points. Then analytical methods can be classified as excellent (> 75 points), acceptable (75-50) and inadequate (<50). This type of workshops makes the students understand and be aware of green chemistry when they perform laboratory practices, in relation for example with the amount of reagents used or the generation of residues. Additionally, undergraduate students work with recently published articles that especially motivate them. This application helps students to be critical with the laboratory practice, assessing the importance of their work in order to avoid environmental pollution or overspend of reagents or energy. The proposed activities were highly appreciated by the students, because they can learn themselves how to use metrics to assess the greenness of chemical processes. At the same time, it increases their motivation to study subjects related with chemistry and environment.

Catalyst has a noteworthy role in chemical processes in both industrial and scientific fields. Use of catalyst can helps to serve less energy, time and money. As a result, chemical process became more eco-friendly and economical. Nanocatalysts are an important branch in this issue. Multicomponent reactions (MCRs) are one of the most effective strategies in the field of green chemistry; witch is the utilization of a set of principles that reduces or eliminates the use or generation of hazardous substances in the design, manufacture, and application of chemical products. Therefore, by application of nanocatalysts in MCRs, chemical synthesis can approach aims of green and sustainable chemistry. As it is mentioned nanocatalyst, are important field and have many advantages in recent years. Magnetic nanocatalysts are a subdivision of catalyst and beneficial strategy in green chemistry. Biocatalysts are another one either. Meet of these two branches results a new, efficient and green nanocatalyst. Chitosan is a biopolymer and it is used in many organic syntheses as catalyst, supporting this with a magnetic nanocatalystmodified this biocatalyst and enhance its properties, also leads to another efficient and green catalyst.

Green analytical chemistry as an integral part of sustainable education development

Educating the next generation of chemists about green chemistry issues, such as waste minimisation and clean synthesis, is vital for environmental sustainability. This book enables green issues to be taught from the underlying principles of all chemistry courses rather than in isolation. Chapters contributed by green chemistry experts from across the globe, with experience in teaching at different academic levels, provide a coherent overview of possible approaches to incorporate green chemistry into existing curriculums. Split into three sections, the book first introduces sustainability and green chemistry education , before focussing on high school green chemistry education initiatives and green chemistry education at undergraduate and post-graduate levels. Useful laboratory experiments and in-class activities to aid teaching are included. This book is a valuable resource for chemical educators worldwide who wish to integrate green chemistry into chemical education in a systematic and holistic way. It is also of interest to anyone wanting to learn more about the different approaches adopted around the world in sustainability education.

Concerns about environmental pollution, global climate change and hazards to human health have increased dramatically. This has led to a call for change in chemical processes including those that are part of chemical analysis. The development of analytical chemistry continues and every new discovery in chemistry, physics, molecular biology, and materials science brings new opportunities and challenges. Yet, contemporary analytical chemistry does not consume resources optimally. Indeed, the usage of toxic chemical compounds is at the highest rate ever. All this makes the emerging field of green chemistry a “hot topic” in industrial, governmental laboratories as well as in academia. This book starts by introducing the twelve principles of green chemistry. It then goes on to discuss how the principles of green chemistry can be used to assess the ‘greenness’ of analytical methodologies. The ‘green profile’ proposed by the ACS Green Chemistry Institute is also presented. A chapter on “Greening” sample preparation describes approaches to minimizing toxic solvent use, using non-toxic alternatives, and saving energy. The chapter on instrumental methods describes existing analytical approaches that are inherently green and making non-green methods greener. The final chapter on signal acquisition describes how quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR) ideas could reduce experimental work thus making analysis greener. The book concludes with a discussion of how green chemistry is both possible and necessary. Green Analytical Chemistry is aimed at managers of analytical laboratories but will also interest teachers of analytical chemistry and green public policy makers.

Chapter 1 - Green Chemistry: Foundations in Cosmetic Sciences