- "Students are given the opportunity to assess chemical products and processes and design greener alternatives when appropriate."
- "Students understand and can evaluate the environmental, social, and health impacts of a chemical product over the life cycle of the product, from synthesis to disposal."
At the highest level of the ACS guidelines, students are expected to have a deeper understanding of and critical thinking skills around developing and designing greener chemical products and processes. This can include the various environmental, social and health aspects of a chemical product, in particular as it pertains to life cycle analysis.
GCTLC Library
Below are resources from the GCTLC library that are tagged with any of the following Green Chemistry Principles:
- #3 (Less Hazardous Chemical Syntheses)
- #4 (Design Safer Chemicals)
- #5 (Safer Solvents and Auxiliaries)
OR have been tagged with keyword "Life Cycle Assessment".
The variety of resources below should provide educators with numerous options to help tailor their lectures and courses with more green and sustainable chemistry content. However, if you have additional suggestions for resources, you can always submit them for inclusion in the GCTLC library, or you can post them in the forum "Green Chemistry Resources for Addressing the ACS Guidelines" on the GCTLC.
A Greener Chemiluminescence Demonstration
This demonstration shows students a long-lasting, chemiluminescent reaction in light sticks without the toxic solvents. The instructor must prepare the chemiluminescent reagent, divanillyl oxalate, in a one-step synthetic procedure or can have the students prepare the reagent as part of an organic chemistry experiment.
Solvents acceptable for the chemiluminescence reaction are ethyl acetate or ...
A guidebook for sustainability in laboratories
This guidebook aims to improve lab users’ everyday practices to become more sustainable. Specifically, this guidebook provides practical suggestions on how to effectively use lab instruments and resources and how to acquire data. We provide advice to labs covering disciplines such as biology, chemistry, computational science, engineering, life sciences, materials sciences, medicine, pharmacy, and ...
A Guided Inquiry Laboratory Activity to Explore Reactivity of Carbonyl Compounds
A laboratory activity to demonstrate reactivity of carbonyl compounds using Meldrum's acid as a nucleophile is presented. The experiment requires no solvent and can be completed in a single 3-4 hour laboratory period. Substrate information and related spectroscopic information are provided.
Tracey, M. P., Nigam, M., Pirzada, E., & Osman, T. (2024). A solventless carbonyl addition reaction as a ...
A Microscale Heck Reaction In Water
This laboratory experiment features the palladium-catalyzed Heck synthesis of (E)-4-acetylcinnamic acid from 4-iodoacetophenone and acrylic acid by mid-level undergraduates. Traditional Heck reaction organic solvents (e.g. acetonitrile) and base (e.g. triethylamine) are replaced by water and sodium carbonate respectively. This approach introduces fundamentals of green chemistry (aqueous and ...
A Solvent-Free Baeyer–Villiger Lactonization for the Undergraduate Organic Laboratory: Synthesis of γ-t-Butyl-ε-caprolactone
The transformation of ketones into esters using peroxy acids was first reported in 1899. Since then, the Baeyer-Villiger oxidation has found itself an integral part of the organic chemist's toolkit. This modified Baeyer-Villiger is a great example of how a classic reaction can be made significantly greener. By eliminating the solvent you can avoid the hazards associated with dichloromethane (the ...
A survey of solvent selection guides
This published article provides an overview of the many solvent selection guides that had been published up until that point as well as a compilation of the data from the guides to allow for a ranked comparison of all solvents, allowing for a general grouping into four categories: recommended, problematic, hazardous and highly hazardous. Of the 51 solvents considered, 17 could not be unequivocally ...
Advanced Organic Chemistry
This module is part of a collection of nine green chemistry teaching modules developed in the early 2000s by a team of faculty (Donna Narsavage-Heald, Trudy Dickneider, David Marx, Timothy Foley, Joan Wasilewski) led by Michael Cann at the University of Scranton and has been migrated to the GCTLC. The subjects of the modules are based on winners of the Green Chemistry Challenge Awards. The modules ...
Alternative Solvents for Green Chemistry
This book provides an overview of solvents and their greener alternatives, including in applications such as synthetic chemistry, purification, analytical chemistry, materials science, catalysis, and more. It also provides some of the latest evidence from the time of research into "greener" solvents, including switchable solvents and biosolvents, as well as areas of interest such as naturally ...
An Asymptotic Approach to the Development of a Green Organic Chemistry Laboratory
This article provides a rationale and stepwise process for evaluating and improving the "greenness" of an undergraduate organic chemistry laboratory curriculum. After emphasizing the educational value of sharing this process with students, effective risk assessment is discussed as an important tool for both evaluating and redesigning laboratory exercises. The greening process is illustrated by ...
An Innovation Studio Leans into the Power of Green Chemistry
Schoolab is an innovation studio that pairs student teams with corporate partners to solve real-world business & design challenges. In the US, they run a program at the University of California Berkeley called "Deplastify the Planet."
Recently it became clear that the sustainable design solutions they were trying to create would benefit tremendously from taking their design thinking all the ...