Quantitative analysis, CHE 323, is a required and essential component to the educational career of a chemistry student at Utica College. This course is where students learn fundamental and modern chemical analysis methods. Currently, many analytical teaching laboratory protocols utilize hazardous chemicals and create wastes with greater toxicity than that of the sample being analyzed. Instructors of CHE 323 use the laboratory procedures from the course textbook, <i>Fundamentals of Analytical Chemistry</i>, under the chapter designated Selected Methods of Analysis. Our current work specifically explores the procedure entitled, Titrations with Potassium Permanganate (38F-3), in which students determine the amount of calcium in limestone samples through a complex multi-step procedure. At the conclusion of this lab, the Chemistry Department recovers large quantities of hazardous waste, a significant portion being unused and unstable potassium permanganate. Potassium permanganate is classified as corrosive (skin corrosion and serious eye damage) and environmentally damaging (hazard to aquatic environment) ranked as a category 1 hazard (most dangerous by the Globally Harmonized System (GHS)). Using methods of green chemistry, our goal is to replace potassium permanganate with another, less harmful, oxidizer to ensure the same analytical precision of the original lab procedure and/or to scale down the amount potassium permanganate produced, if a safer chemical substitute cannot be identified. Exploration into greener oxidation-reduction titrations will also be an aim for this work, to maintain the academic rigor needed for this type of reaction. The incorporation of green chemistry into analytical methods, such as CHE 323 at Utica College, can reduce the environmental impact from hazardous waste and create awareness in developing chemistry students of green chemistry principles.

Exploring green chemistry methodologies in an analytical teaching laboratory

2019 Spring National Meeting

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.