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Every spring, my thoughts turn to… you guessed it, waste pickup. I listen
politely as my system’s safety officer tells us to list exactly what waste
we have so the costs can be kept as low as possible. Then I inflate the amount
of waste we have so the college doesn’t get stuck with 25 boxes of light
bulbs or 50 pounds of mercury for another year. Microscale chemistry and eliminating
sources of waste such as the traditional qualitative analysis schemes only go
so far. ACS (in cooperation with the Royal Society of Chemistry and Gesellschaft
Deutscher Chemiker) has produced a short manual with laboratory activities and
background information that has an emphasis on reducing waste.
The book is divided into six units, each discussing a principle of green chemistry.
At the end of the book The Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry can be found.
These include using ambient temperatures and pressures for reactions and to design
syntheses that incorporate as many process materials as possible in the final
product. It seems that the six unit themes are summaries of the twelve principles.
However, it strikes me that if this is a book about green chemistry, shouldn’t
all of the principles be listed in the beginning? By doing so, one could discuss
how each principle is addressed in the fun syntheses and analyses contained
in the manual. Neither the mathematics nor the chemistry is difficult, making
it suitable for high school chemistry or general science classes, college ecology
classes, or any introductory chemistry course. While the editors list the experiments
as being inquiry-based, it seems to me that the directions provide far greater
detail than those normally found with inquiry-based experiments. However, the
questions after each activity do lend themselves to a discussion of inquiry-based
science.
The book comes with a CD-ROM that contains the entire book, a PowerPoint presentation
about green chemistry, and another PowerPoint presentation in black-and-white
that can be used to make transparencies or handouts. To me, the only benefit of
having the book on CD-ROM is to copy certain lessons without having to turn pages;
the green chemistry presentation is useless to me. However, I would use the black-and-white
file to make handouts and transparencies for my class.
This manual cannot be used to replace a chemistry text for a “consumer
chemistry” course. However, it would make a good lab manual for the course,
and it would also make a good manual for an inquiry-based science education course.
(The best way to teach conservation to future generations is to teach it to our
teachers.) In the meantime, we need to use reagents that are not only safer, but
that will actually be used in the laboratory—so a safety officer won’t
need to scream about disposal of reagents that have sat on the shelf for a decade
or more.
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