The editors of Chemistry Teacher International are happy to announce the publication of a special issue on Green Chemistry and Sustainable Development.
Special thanks to guest editors Bipulbehari Saha, Francesca Kerton and Hemda Garelick for their work in bringing this issue together. And of course to the authors of the articles published in this special issue.
In many chemistry curricula Green Chemistry has become a feature. The curriculum in the Netherlands is an example (Apotheker, 2018). In introductory chemistry courses in higher education more and more attention is given to the principles of green chemistry (Hjeresen et al., 2000), as well as the ideas of sustainable development (UN Sustainable Development Goals, n.d.). This includes design principles like ‘cradle to cradle’, ‘cradle to grave’ as well as life cycle analysis (Braungart & McDonough, 2002).
Green chemistry for chemical synthesis addresses our future challenges in working with chemical processes and products by inventing novel reactions that can maximize the desired products, minimize by-products and eliminate the production of harmful substances in designing new synthetic schemes that can simplify the operations in chemical productions. The important inherent properties of molecules need to be considered from the earliest stage—the design stage—to address whether compounds and processes are depleting versus renewable, toxic versus benign, and persistent versus readily degradable. Sustainable economic growth requires safe, sustainable resources for industrial production (Li & Trost, 2008)
The number of concrete examples to illustrate these principles, that are used in education at this moment, is limited, even though there are many recent examples.
Within chemistry education it is important for students to understand the role chemistry plays in society. One of these roles is to apply chemical knowledge to design processes that implement the principles of Green Chemistry and help in Sustainable Development.
In order to demonstrate the role of chemistry more information for teachers is needed, so they can use this information and share this with their students.
In total nine articles will be published in this special issue (Table 1). Most of the describing interesting experiments that can easily be used by teachers to introduce and illustrate the principles of green chemistry (Anastas & Eghbali, 2010). Some of the experiments were used and designed to be carried out at home. This was caused by the lockdowns occurring during the covid pandemia.
List of articles.
| Title | Author | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction to the special issue on Green Chemistry | Jan Apotheker | |
| 2 | Linkwitz and Eilks (2021) | Simple experiments with immobilized enzymes as a contribution to green and sustainable chemistry education in the high school laboratory | Ingo Eilks |
| 3 | Ranu et al. (2021) | Learning Green Chemistry and its Principles from Nature’s Process and Development of Green Procedures Mimicking Nature | Brindaben Ranu |
| 4 | Lembens et al. (2022) | Spotting Science – a digital learning environment to introduce Green Chemistry to secondary students and the public | Anja Lembdens |
| 5 | Buenaflor et al. (2022) | Student explorations of calcium alginate bead formation by varying pH and concentration of acidic beverage juices | Janet Wissinger |
| 6 | Linkwitz et al. (2022) | Simple green organic chemistry experiments with the kitchen microwave for high school chemistry classrooms | Ingo Eilks |
| 7 | Baharin et al. (2022) | Basic concept and application of conducting polymers for environmental protection | Ruhaida Rusmin |
| 8 | Pérez-Vallejo et al. (2022) | Distance learning: An interdisciplinary experiment on Rayleigh scattering | Jorge Ibanez |
| 9 | Imai et al. (2022) | Development of teaching material for green and sustainable chemistry (GSC) in Japan | Izumi Imai |
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Author contributions: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.
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Research funding: None declared.
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Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding this article.
References
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