Summary
The paper presents an interdisciplinary course entitled Greener Solutions that has brought together graduate students in chemistry, environmental health, and engineering to understand each other’s disciplines, and to work together to develop safer alternatives to hazardous chemicals and manufacturing processes. A new course, Green Safe Water, that is an adaptation of Greener Solutions model, demonstrating how this approach can serve a different subject matter and instructional level, is also presented. During the former course students are asked to seek alternatives to a hazardous chemical in a product or manufacturing process, and throughout the later course they are asked to conduct research interventions to address the presence of a hazardous metal in drinking water.
Students undertake a bioinspired design process and then assess the potential health and environmental hazards associated with each of their proposed alternatives relative to hazards of the current chemistry approaches. For this, students must develop a systems thinking approach that requires careful consideration of the ways that chemicals and materials are transformed into products, and how they interact with and affect human health, ecosystems and economic systems over the course of the material’s manufacture, use, and disposal.
Finally, students generate a focused alternatives assessment that considers technical performance, relative hazard and exposure potential, and feasibility, creating an “opportunity map” for the partner company and, ideally, the industry sector. The semester-long project culminates in a final report, poster, and presentation to the partner organization and to the public.
In both courses, students develop a deep awareness of the importance of framing and solving problems through systems thinking. They investigate alternative strategies that draw from BID, beginning with an understanding of a chemical’s function, an approach that allows the student teams to consider nonchemical solutions. While students from both Greener Solutions and Green Safe Water have identified a few potentially ground-breaking innovations projects, perhaps more importantly the courses continue to produce new ways of thinking about challenges in the fields of green chemistry and alternatives assessment.
Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
The paper deal with interdisciplinarity and systems thinking.
Authors argue that interdisciplinary inquiry-based learning requires a significant degree of intellectual humility, a characteristic they try to both model and teach.
The paper presents systems thinking as a means of anticipating and avoiding complications that can arise when conventional thinking is applied to complex problems. According to the authors, systems thinking recognizes that problems arise within a system of interrelated components connected by feedback loops that generate patterns of behavior over time .Investigating the relationship between the structure of a system and its behavior reveals leverage points where one can fundamentally shift the function or orientation of the entire system.
