Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
2.4
Teaching Green Analytical Chemistry
Teaching analytical chemistry today is in our opinion, maintaining the advances of the past in order to
improve the main analytical figures of merit of the available approaches and also to improve them. At the
same time it is necessary to answer adequately the problems related to our social compromise with
the safety of operators and the environment. Especially in Europe, the present situation created by the
REACH norm concerning the Register Evaluation Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals, imposes
new responsibilities on us in order to educate well our future chemists in basic principles and methodologies
of chemical and instrumental analysis as well as in trace analysis, chemometrics, automation and sensors.
In this framework it will become especially important to consider the deleterious effects of chemicals and
chemical reactions in order to ensure that our university students could have ethical behaviour and
evaluate the immediate changes to make in the classical approaches in order to take advantage of the new
economic opportunities offered.
So, teaching analytical chemistry will include thinking about the analytical problems and their solutions in
terms of sustainability, considering both the classical figures of merit reported in the past, but also evaluating
the persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic characteristics (PBC) of some reagents, the use of hazardous or
corrosive reagents or solvents and the generation of analytical wastes. These latter aspects are important in
order to make the appropriate reagent replacement, to move from hard to soft analytical practices and to
evaluate energy consumption additionally than to minimize waste generation and to incorporate their on-line
treatment in the body of the whole analytical process. So, the challenge today is to fix new objectives without
sacrificing the former ones and it must transform all our teaching practices from the content of the theoretical
lessons to the laboratory practices.
In fact teaching Green Analytical Chemistry cannot mean to add lessons on the side effects of our methods.
On the contrary, all the contents must be modified by introducing the environmental ethical compromise,
from beginning to end of the analytical process. It could be a nonsense to speak about safety and pollution
risks of the old practices without providing alternatives. So, from our point of view, greening our teaching
practices must involve a strong theoretical effort together with a change in our practices, starting from the
seminars and practical work suggested to students and incorporating decontamination steps in our laboratory
experiments [24].
In recent years many efforts have been made in order to incorporate Green Chemistry principles to education
contained in the short text from 2002 by the American Chemical Society
Introduction to Green Chemistry:
Instructional Activities for Introductory Chemistry
[25]. Unfortunately Green Chemistry in many cases has
remained the matter of study in specific master's programs remaining and optional matters, in spite of efforts
made in prestigious journals like the
Journal of Chemical Education
devoted to education in chemistry
[26,27]. Because of that, we continue to be far from the desire expressed by Daryle Busch, when he was
president of the American Chemical Society, that Green Chemistry could represent one of the milestones
which could contribute to a sustainable future by 2000 and because of that it was absolutely necessary to
teach the value of the Green Chemistry to the chemists of tomorrow [28]. Unfortunately, to our knowledge
there is no prospect of a textbook in analytical chemistry written from the perspective of Green Chemistry and
we are far from the integration of the research efforts for greening the analytical procedures in our everyday
teaching activity. For this reason (see Figure 2.6) we are convinced that a pedagogical effort must be made in
all different aspects from the integration of theoretical principles of Green Analytical Chemistry in the
university text books to the generalized use of material safety data sheets (MSDS) on both the laboratory
notebook documents and as complementary data from analytical method protocols. Additionally, the
incorporation of green pictograms and green parameters in the seminars devoted to evaluate different
alternative methods to solve real problems could be really helpful in creating a new mentality in our young
students.
