Chemistry students at UBC Okanagan are learning how to reduce the environmental impact of their laboratory work as the UBCO Department of Chemistry has integrated the Principles of Green Chemistry into their undergraduate chemistry laboratory curriculum, thanks to support from UBC's Green Labs Fund. Students now consider the origins and waste streams of chemical reagents in their assignments, and teaching assistants (TAs) lead discussions about sustainable approaches to chemistry to teach students how to make informed decisions about what reagents would be more sustainable to use based on environmental impacts. These concepts are being incorporated across different levels of Chemistry courses at UBCO in a unique program to prepare students to aid society as scientists and professionals.  But how did this initiative come to life?  

The initiative was the brainchild of Dr. Jennifer Robison (former Chemistry Lab Manager) who applied to the Green Labs Fund in 2022 seeking to teach students the relevance of sustainable chemistry to their lives, the environment and society, and was awarded the grant. Each year, UBC Green Labs funds projects across the Vancouver and Okanagan campuses that focus on incorporating sustainability into laboratory work and reducing the sizable environmental impact from UBC labs.   

Upon Dr. Robison’s retirement, Dr. Tamara Freeman, Associate Professor of Teaching, the new Chemistry Lab Manager Ieva Zigg, and Chemistry Lab Technician Michele Cannon took the helm. They brought on board graduate student staff and worked to explore options for student-input based systems, which resulted in creating a physical table of reagents that would include notes on the origins (e.g. mined, synthesized, by-products) and waste streams of chemical reagents that students would use during their laboratory classes. This table would allow students to make informed decisions about what reagents would be more sustainable to use based on the environmental impacts of the sourcing and waste processing of the reagents.   

This approach is being incorporated by the team across different levels of laboratory courses at UBCO: 

  • First-year students are engaged in pre-lab quizzes centered on using that table of reagents.  
  • This system is being adapted to use in second-year chemistry courses in addition to industry databases such as the AGREE-Analytical GREEnness calculator for analytical procedures and the DOZN tool by Millipore Sigma for organic synthesis.   
  • Fourth-year students delve deeper and are tasked to assess the chemicals they use in a semester-long project for their analytical chemistry lab and sort the waste into appropriate streams.  

These techniques facilitated a deeper understanding of environmental impacts and empowered students to propose sustainable solutions within their laboratory projects.   

This project is currently ongoing at UBCO with feedback from students indicating interest for more material on chemical origins and waste management, with suggestions to prepare “helpful tips” for reusing materials in the lab (for example, reusing weigh boats, but not pipette tips). The positive feedback from students is a win for the team toward developing Dr. Robison’s vision to make such awareness a regular and expected part of their undergraduate lab experience to foster the students’ abilities to assess chemical products and processes and design greener alternatives when appropriate. Looking ahead, the team hopes to integrate the green chemistry initiative into further chemistry classes, and to hopefully collaborate with instructors at the UBC Vancouver campus to share ideas to advance sustainable initiatives.   

We would like to thank Jennifer Robison, Tamara Freeman, Ieva Zigg, Michele Cannon and Alisha Greene for their incredible work bringing this project to life. You can learn more about this project – along with a handful of the other numerous projects supported by the Green Labs Fund since its inception in 2009 – by watching the recorded event The Laboratories of Tomorrow: A Sustainability Showcase. More information about the Green Labs Fund can be found on our webpage: Green Labs Fund.