Webinar Archive

During our Green Chemistry Commitment (GCC) Info Session in January 2023, you will:

• Learn more about the GCC’s benefits and outcomes from a current GCC signer – The Green Chemistry Commitment at Texas Woman’s University (Dr. Nasrin Mirsaleh-Kohan, Associate Professor of Physics, Texas Woman’s University)
• Discover our latest initiatives for the Higher Education community including the Green Chemistry Teaching & Learning Community (GCTLC) Online Platform and our Minority Serving Institution (MSI) Initiative.

Is your student group interested in applying for the ACS Green Chemistry Student Chapter Award? Are you from a Minority-Serving Institution (MSI) or does your group comprise and/or work with minority communities?

As part of our MSI Initiative, Beyond Benign is providing guidance and support to MSI/minority student groups to win awards for their green chemistry work! In this Info Session, you can hear more about Beyond Benign’s Grant Program, which offers funding to student groups to help them apply for an ACS Green Chemistry Student Chapter Award.

• Our featured speakers for this event are Carolyn Dewey and Josh Gann from the ACS-UMN Student Chapter (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities). ACS-UMN is a previous winner of an ACS Green Chemistry Student Chapter Award!

During our Green Chemistry Commitment (GCC) Info Session, you will:

• Learn more about the GCC’s benefits and outcomes from Beyond Benign GCC leadership and a current GCC signer.
• Discover our latest initiatives for the Higher Education community including the Green Chemistry Teaching & Learning Community (GCTLC) Online Platform and our Minority Serving Institution (MSI) Initiative.

Chemistry is everywhere. But it goes mostly unseen. Society has come to view the invisibility of chemistry as something insidious, like a monster under our beds, lurking, waiting to hurt us. Open up the newspaper, turn on the radio, look on the internet, we all know the stories: Carcinogens, Climate Change, Ocean Plastics, Endocrine Disruptors… When chemistry is visible, it’s usually not good. It doesn’t have to be this way.  This presentation will discuss three necessary efforts that the chemical enterprises must undertake to maximize our ability to invent the future sustainably. (1) Broadening the chemistry community, (2) Invention education and (3) True multidisciplinarity. Invention with Intention requires that we continue to cultivate and celebrate the amazing things that chemistry is already well known for. But we must be more accessible to the non-chemistry community. Because at the end of the day, we do what we do – to serve them.

Learn more about Dr. John Warner, candidate for ACS President, by visiting his website.

Monique Harden (Assistant Director of Law and Policy and Community Engagement Program Manager, Deep South Center for Environmental Justice) and Martha Dina Arguello (Executive Director, Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles)– two leaders of the environmental justice movement – introduced participants to the concept of environmental justice, how environmental injustice affects communities and the important role that green chemistry and green chemists can play in both improving community and ecosystem health and creating new economic opportunities for communities. Speakers discussed ways in which minority and lower income communities can become active participants in the green chemistry movement. This webinar was moderated by Dr. Joel Tickner (Professor of Environmental Health, University of Massachusetts Lowell).

Additional Information:

Deep South Center for Environmental Justice

Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles

Speaker: Dr. John Warner, Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry

The natural world is a beautiful and intricate system of intertwined and overlapping materials ecosystems. As humans, our understanding of the various interrelationships is only at the most basic level. One important reason why these naturally interdependent cyclic systems exist with exquisite complexity is because of the very fact that they all co-emerged over hundreds of thousands of years in the presence of one another. Evolutionary forces drove symbiotic relationships by selecting for and against mechanisms and materials that were conducive to the success of the entire multi-component matrix. As human society seeks to create a circular economy, we unfortunately have the disadvantage that our various industrial “species” have developed with a level of independence, essentially unaware of adjacent processes. We are forced into a position of creating connectivities that were not part of the considerations in the original design. Obviously this creates a daunting challenge. While there have been some examples of the circular economy designed and deployed in many industrial settings, the vast majority of industrial products and processes continue to exist disconnected and unsustainable over the long run. The pathway to create most of these technological ecosystems will require the inventive application of green chemistry (the molecular level mechanistic underpinnings of sustainability). Nature creates materials of such exquisite structural complexity and diversity that humans may never be able to mimic them. Nature’s elegance is even more astounding when one considers the fact that most chemistry in the biological world is carried out at ambient temperature and pressure using water, for the most part, as its reaction medium. For society to become truly sustainable, the way we manufacture, use and repurpose materials must change dramatically. This presentation will describe John Warner’s entropic considerations of materials design and illustrate their application through recent R&D examples from the Warner Babcock Institute of Green Chemistry.

Speakers:

• Jennifer MacKellar, Program Manager, ACS Green Chemistry Institute
• Dr. Amy Keirstead, Interim Associate Dean, College of Arts & Sciences, Associate Professor of Chemistry, University of New England
• Jessica White, ACS Student Chapter President, University of New England
• Dr. Amanda Carroll, Lecturer of Chemistry, Tennessee Tech
• Jonah Ralston, Green Chemistry Chair, Tennessee Tech