Integrating Green Chemistry and Life Cycle Assessment into a Second-Year Organic Chemistry Laboratory

Chemistry is not inherently ‘green’ but chemists can adapt their practices to make chemical processes ‘greener’ and lower environmental and human toxicity. To make chemistry greener, we need to train chemists to consider their role in minimizing human and environmental harm and give them the skills to choose safer and ‘greener’ syntheses. Beyond Benign has created a Green Chemistry Commitment to be signed by universities which gives them the responsibility to incorporate green chemistry into the undergraduate chemistry curriculum. One way to meet this commitment and teach about the impacts of chemical synthesis is through Life Cycle Assessment which quantitatively considers the human and environmental toxicity of synthetic routes. This project sought to adapt an existing second-year undergraduate chemistry laboratory experiment to incorporate ideas of green chemistry and Life Cycle Assessment. The experiment was performed with varying experimental conditions, including concentration, reaction time, catalyst loading, type of catalyst, and workup procedure to develop three procedures that can be performed or analyzed by students. Life Cycle Assessments were conducted on each of these procedures to scaffold a post-laboratory activity that showcases the effects of these varied experimental conditions on impact-based metrics. The adapted experiment prompts students to reflect on the ‘green-ness’ of each procedure based on metrics like smog formation, global warming, and human toxicity, as well as potential trade-offs with yield. This adaptation can be applied as a post-laboratory exercise to other undergraduate chemistry experiments without modifying the laboratory procedure. This work exemplifies how principles of green chemistry can be incorporated into educational settings without requiring a complete redesign of curricula. Future work may investigate how these principles may be incorporated into existing lecture activities of undergraduate chemistry courses.