Developing Students’ Understanding of Industrially Relevant Economic and Life Cycle Assessments

Abstract

Training future leaders to understand life cycle assessment data is critical for effective research, business, and sociopolitical decision-making. However, the technical nature of these life cycle reports often makes them challenging for students and other nonexperts to comprehend. Therefore, we outline here the key takeaways from recent economic and life cycle assessments for three major commodity chemicalsethylene, ethylene oxide, and terephthalic acidthat are precursors for plastics, synthetic fibers, and many other consumer products. The five lessons and 10 discussion prompts (provided in the Supporting Information) serve as useful teaching tools for introductory chemistry and chemical engineering courses.

Experiential Learning To Promote Systems Thinking in Chemistry: Evaluating and Designing Sustainable Products in a Polymer Immersion Lab

“…In this light, Bode et al. developed lessons and discussion prompts aimed at teaching students to understand and generalize technically challenging life cycle assessments . A couple of universities have begun offering sustainable product design courses to train business students to evaluate scientific facts and assertions. , These types of practical approaches to teaching green chemistry are important for making chemistry concepts approachable to students with a variety of career interests and expertise.…”

Shaping Effective Practices for Incorporating Sustainability Assessment in Manuscripts Submitted to ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering: Catalysis and Catalytic Processes

“…Prospective LCA builds on current LCA projections to project future process and product improvement scenarios, thereby providing a trajectory for current technologies to improve sustainability attributes. As an example, upstream environmental burdens stemming from the use of fossil-based feedstocks and energy sources are dominant in a majority of the current technologies, even though their gate-to-gate profiles may be far superior to incumbent technologies . The prospective LCA approach can thus provide a trajectory of environmental impact changes over time when renewable carbon and energy sources become increasingly available to make chemical products.…”

Graduate Student Designed and Delivered: An Upper-Level Online Course for Undergraduates in Green Chemistry and Sustainability

“…A recent publication outlines a way for students to more easily comprehend LCA through several discussion prompts based on actual LCA data. 39 These prompts can be formatted to an in-person or online class, and can convey the importance of LCA without overwhelming the students.…”

“…To make adjustments for the next iteration of the course, the instructors have decided to make modifications to the LCA assignment in order to help clarify it, while still having it remain challenging. A recent publication outlines a way for students to more easily comprehend LCA through several discussion prompts based on actual LCA data . These prompts can be formatted to an in-person or online class, and can convey the importance of LCA without overwhelming the students.…”