Review of the twenty-three year evolution of the first university course in green chemistry: teaching future leaders how to create sustainable societies

Abstract

In 1992, it was clear that the challenge of transforming tertiary chemistry education to assist with leadership development for what is now called “sustainability” held important potential. There were no appropriately focused university courses. Green chemistry had not been named. So a course for upper level undergraduates and graduates, now entitled Chemistry and Sustainability (C&S), was launched to build both professorial and student competence for advancing the relationship between commercial chemistry and health and the environment. C&S has undergone iterative development ever since to better educate students in sustainability leadership. This contribution reviews the insights that clarified into what is important for tertiary education to address in chemical sustainability. The reviewed C&S concepts, methods, tools, and assessments include: 1) the strategic thinking, 2) three early sets of principles evaluated for relative steering power toward the most hazardous chemical sustainability challenges, 3) the syllabus and objectives, 4), the presentation style, 5) the thematic content highlighting; (i) the organizational tool for green science technical challenges called the C&S Bookcase, (ii) the conceptual-analytical tool for identifying future-safe technologies called the Technology-Sustainability Compass (TSC), and (iii) the ethical code developed to provide students with a theoretical foundation for sustainability path-finding called the Code of Sustainability Ethics for Leaders (COSEL), 6) the interdisciplinary content meshing technical chemical education with (i) the pursuit of transgenerational justice developed from the ethics of Hans Jonas, (ii) the history of chemical pollution, (iii) the impact of toxic elements, persistent molecular pollutants and endocrine disruptors on health and the environment, and (iv) strategic leadership for sustainability, 7) the use of stellar internet resources on the health and environmental content of energy and chemicals to emphasize immediacy, relevancy and importance, 8) the homework assignments, and 9) the 2014–15 student course analyses. This review is intended to deliver cognition grenades to vaporize clouds of obscurity shielding fortresses of unsustainability in the chemical enterprise—the most demanding sustainability challenges today are cultural strongholds that must be breached and not technical rivers that must be forded. The key C&S transformative insight is that cultural blockades against the rational advancement of sustainability within the chemical and allied enterprises, the resulting impacts, and the strategies for breaking free should be emphasized with the relevant technical content in the quest for competence in educating leaders for a sustainable world. This long review is a concatenation of four thematic reviews, so integrated to help interested teachers design related courses.

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