Hi Everyone!

I'm really excited to post about an opportunity for our community to collaborate on a new project led by Beyond Benign with funding from MilliporeSigma (see announcement here)!! The need for this projects resource has been evident since a discussion on VIPEr beginning in 2013 which you can see here. We are hoping to collaborate with faculty and IONiC/VIPEr as a whole for this initiative!
 

The Opportunity:
The project looks to develop an open-access resource guide specifically towards Inorganic Chemistry for the first time, which will help universities/faculty looking to include green chemistry experiments in their Inorganic courses and programs. While other disciplines have had much focus on integrating greener practices, the field of Inorganic Chemistry is an area generally lagging behind (in our opinion).

For reference, it will be our version of the guide developed in 2018 for Organic chemistry, which you can access attached to this post! 
 

How to Get Involved/Contribute:
At this time, we're specifically looking to compile the laboratory experiments that are currently being used for Inorganic courses across our institutions, and we are looking to curate a collection of published or personal experiments that are "greener". We need your help in identifying key traditional lab exercises and greener alternative lab exercises in use or within the literature! 

We ask that you please complete this short survey to contribute to this project with your department's current methods for instructing general/inorganic chemistry laboratories at the undergraduate level. Additionally, you can express your interest in working with a group of higher education faculty interested in greener laboratory resources for the year to come! We hope to have monthly ~1 hour meetings, collaboration on developing/testing new "greener" labs, sharing resources, etc. 

Within this survey is a link to a shared google folder where you can upload any syllabi/experiments/references you currently use, as well as any other resources you feel should be included in this new guide!

Contact us:
If you know of other faculty members conducting greener undergraduate labs or interested in getting involved, please refer them to us and/or send an email! We'd be happy to provide more information and further discussion! I'll be co-coordinating this project (john.debackere@utoronto.ca) as a Faculty Fellow, alongside another IONiC member and Beyond Benign staffer, Natalie O'Neil (natalie_oneil@beyondbenign.org). 

About Beyond Benign:
For those not familiar, Beyond Benign is a non-profit chemistry education organization that focuses on fostering a green chemistry literacy to transform chemistry education for a sustainable future (find out more here: https://www.beyondbenign.org/).