Substitution of a laboratory practice with a focus on ‘chemistry green’ as a tool for the reduction of hazardous waste
Main Article Content
Abstract
Chemistry labs allow technical education in a lot of professions. However, in the environmental area, they should have a cleaner approach, where the students can handle the concepts, but in a harmless form. Changing laboratory practices to practices with a green chemistry approach, allows the acquisition of knowledge, but with the improvement of being environmentally responsible. A basic assessment of a number of laboratory practices from the Pollutants Measurement course regarding energy use and waste generation was performed. Based on this assessment, a practice was substituted, moving from one with a green assessment of 3 to one with a green assessment of 8, achieving the incorporation of the same concepts in both cases. With the replacement of the back-titration practice, there is no significant difference in the acquisition of knowledge. But in waste generation the improvement was notorious; from 3.3 mole of highly dangerous waste to 0.2 mole of incipient hazardous waste. It is concluded that green chemistry allows to have an education with minimal waste generation.
Article Details
Educación Química por Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México se distribuye bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivar 4.0 Internacional.
Basada en una obra en http://www.revistas.unam.mx/index.php/req.