GChELP: A Vital Resource for Teaching Practical Green Chemistry in Industry and Academia

Over the past three decades, there has been a significant increase in the creation and implementation of curricular materials that emphasize green chemistry. While these materials are slowly proliferating in undergraduate courses in higher education, there remains a critical knowledge gap in two key groups: graduate students and chemists in the workplace. Chemists in these groups may not have access to training in green chemistry at any point in their academic training, limiting their readiness to meet industry standards that now include knowledge of green chemistry. This perspective emphasizes the need for more graduate and professional training in green and sustainable chemistry and collaboration between academia and industry to evolve a curriculum that better prepares students to meet employer expectations. The latter requires new curricular resources, which are accessible to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and chemists in the workforce. The American Chemical Society (ACS) Green Chemistry Institute Pharmaceutical Roundtable (GCIPR), a 20-year collaboration between the ACS Green Chemistry Institute (GCI ) and more than 50 companies to advance green chemistry in the production of active pharmaceutical ingredients and related chemistries, shares herein the development of a web-based resource for training in practical green chemistry techniques, the Green Chemistry and Engineering Learning Platform (GChELP). The free resource consists of training modules that cover green chemistry fundamentals, synthetic reagent guides and green chemistry metrics, selection of greener solvents, a synthetic toolbox, principles of process design, and life cycle impacts. Potential uses of the resources by academia and industry are described, with an emphasis on the need to continue development of resources that meet the needs of chemists in the workforce as well as those still in academic training.