Exploring, exploiting and nurturing the strong link between green chemistry education (GCE) and education for sustainable development (ESD)

Abstract

Green chemistry was born in the early 1990s as a bold and concrete commitment by the chemistry community to design safer chemical products and processes for a more sustainable world. It is often considered as an unorthodox yet smarter application of chemistry which protects human health and the environment in an economically viable and sustainable way. It is also the new inevitable paradigm for chemistry to meet the challenges of sustainable development. The emergence of green chemistry entailed sharing this new philosophy and methodology of doing chemistry with other chemists and students aspiring for a chemistry-related career. Education was immediately identified as the most effective medium to propagate the green chemistry message to students and society at large. Science educators realised the overlap between the fundamental green chemistry principles and the overarching concept of sustainable development, and viewed this as an opportunity to infuse sustainability issues in chemistry and science education. This paper investigates such an intersection between green chemistry education and education for sustainable development, and attempts to identify potential

ways and means of implementing some significant aspects of sustainability in pre- university curricula.

This study looks into both the educators’ and students’ perspectives of such an educational endeavour, taking into account the logistics such as resources, training and any potential barriers in teaching these basic principles of sustainable science, as well as the impact on learning such as motivation to study chemistry, moral and ethical thinking skills, environmental awareness and an understanding of the role of science in society.