DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/17518253.2019.1609602

Summary
This article summarizes how the authors have explored issues of equity and environmental justice with the green and sustainable chemistry community. It offers a toolbox for college and university instructors containing foundational language, research, and idea-generation that can be used to strengthen the transition of a traditional chemistry curriculum toward a justice-centered one.
Although the chemical enterprise has provided numerous contributions to humanity, unintended consequences contribute to a disproportionate exposure of hazardous chemicals to certain populations based on race and socioeconomic status. Attending to principles of social and environmental justice within chemistry curriculum provides a framework to reduce these impacts and ensures that the next generations of chemists hold justice-centered principles and actions as a steadfast aspect of their future work. Green chemistry principles can also guide scientists and policy-makers in making evidenced-based decisions in how we design, make, use, and dispose of chemicals and chemical products.
Only recently has equity and social justice become a significant part of the green chemistry conversation.
Social and environmental justice provides a framework for teaching and investigating chemistry as solutions to inequitable health and environmental impacts due to chemical exposure that can be mitigated through green chemistry principles that influence the design, manufacturing, and use of products with an emphasis in considering human and environmental health.
Innovative green and sustainable chemistry technologies have excellent potential to offer solutions to achieve equity and environmental justice. However, the STEM pipeline must be supported by a framework to facilitate the use of social and environmental justice for teaching and investigating chemistry as solutions to justice issues. Linking green and sustainable chemistry to equity and environmental justice has excellent potential to inspire a new audience of students to pursue STEM careers and to strengthen the pipeline through the engagement and retention of students of color and women. Considering aspects of identity, bias, inclusivity, community-centered research, guiding principles of social justice pedagogy, and systems thinking can guide faculty and staff toward supporting a justice-centered focus within curriculum that calls for consideration and protection of human and environmental health. It provides purpose, relevancy, and vision for chemistry students and their future careers as change agents.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
This paper deals with Green and Sustainable Chemistry and system thinking. It describes how Green and sustainable chemistry technologies can contribute to social equity and environmental justice. Integrating social and environmental justice frameworks into chemistry courses and/or programs requires a multi-faceted approach that involves many pieces of a complex puzzle. Systems thinking demonstrates chemistry’s ‘place’ in the larger context of the world by challenging student to ‘think about how chemistry may be used to provide services and functions to other sciences and end-uses as opposed to being an end all to itself to advance the science of chemistry’. This serves justice-oriented outcomes by challenging ideas of hierarchy and helping students recognize post-production impacts in the context of lifecycle inventory and assessment in product development.

Point of Strength
The point of strength of this article is that connects the Green and sustainable chemistry with social equity and environmental justice.