Building a more sustainable chemical enterprise has appeared as one of the major technological and societal challenges that the US and the world faces in the 21st century. Chemical production and use generates a range of ecological and human health impacts, together with significant resource and energy use that contribute greatly to pressures on the biosphere. Green chemistry aims to factor environmental and human health concerns into molecular design. However, despite 20 years of growing green chemistry efforts in the US, there has been little change in the chemical production system. Addressing the social and ethical issues of green chemistry will require a new generation of chemists, educators, environmental health scientists, policy-makers, lawyers, and business managers who are better able to make decisions in the complex context of economic incentives, social behavior, governance systems, the allocation of risks, and principles used in the drafting of rules.
The current narrow graduate training in the US leaves many students ill-equipped to face these complex issues of chemicals use, and more broadly, the societal challenge of sustainability. Moreover, green chemists have given surprisingly little attention to the broad, societal ethical issues raised by green chemistry beyond its technical dictates. To address this, the project team will develop, implement and evaluate an experiential graduate course in the Ethics of Green Chemistry at UC Berkeley, along with smaller modules for integration into other allied programs across the UC Berkeley campus and at UC Riverside. In this course, graduate students in science, technology, law, policy, public health, and business will research and analyze the ethical challenges that pervade green chemistry. The project team's major premise is that chemicals need to be seen more holistically, not simply in terms of isolated chemicals, processes, or technologies, but as systems of flows of chemicals and products throughout societies and ecosystems. This project builds on the extensive scholarly understanding of ethical analysis and decision-making and incorporates insights based on newer investigations that can be applied to green chemistry education. Together, these ideas build a framework around three elements: 1) a holistic systems model based on tracing the life cycle of chemicals and chemical practices that market actors engage in; 2) a public ethics grounded in the understanding of the ways in which social and technical dimensions shape each other, and 3) an experiential learning pedagogy that takes students, educators, and practitioners into situations of ethical questioning.
The project's broader impact includes contributing to the ongoing development of the new Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry, which is one of the nation's first efforts to bring together multiple disciplines from chemistry to health, law, business, and policy into a comprehensive research and teaching activity. More broadly, the project draws greater attention to the important role of ethics education and ethics in understanding why and how legal, market, business, political, and societal systems can affect the chemical production system. It will also highlight how ethical choices might play a role in helping shape the trajectories of the green chemistry field and create curricula that can be used by other instructors and universities.
