Teaching Green Analytical and Synthesis Chemistry: Performing Laboratory Experiments in a Greener Way

Abstract

Our future challenges in resource, environmental and societal sustainability demand efficient and benign-by-design scientific technologies for working with chemical processes and products. In this chapter, we have considered the major aspects of green analytical and synthetic chemistry as a new paradigm and its integration with higher education course curriculum. Teaching green analytical chemistry must be focused on analytical parameters and practices more than on the incorporation of the so-called green parameters to the basic analytical properties. Thus accuracy, representativeness, traceability, sensitivity and selectivity in the renewed paradigmatic chemistry have been complemented and not excluded by additional considerations on the safety of operators and environment. Reduction of risks, reagents, energy and solvent required the search for new innocuous compounds, the highest level of potential information about the samples and measurements and the responsibility of the laboratories about the elimination and/or reduction and decontamination of the analytical wastes. With this end in view, this chapter complies 16 green laboratory experiments which will be useful to the students and the teachers of chemistry alike. The economical consideration of the greening efforts in method development is another very important aspect of green chemistry, and it will be the major reason for extensive practice in the near future.