The Department of Chemistry was among those recognized with a Sustainable Action Award from the U of T Facilities and Services Sustainability Office in 2025.
In a congratulatory post on their website, the Facilities and Services office wrote, “The Department of Chemistry successfully developed the Focus in Green Chemistry undergraduate program to equip students with the knowledge and tools to make responsible, sustainable decisions as future chemists. The program’s laboratory courses have not only prepared students to innovate but have also led to measurable reductions in waste and the replacement of hazardous solvents with more sustainable alternatives. Since 2021, enrollment in key courses has more than doubled and over 50 graduates have already taken this expertise into industry, research and beyond."
According to Andy Dicks, Associate Chair, Undergraduate Studies, the award recognizes work within the department done to make several undergraduate courses more sustainable—essentially, to bring them into further alignment with the 12 Principles of Green Chemistry.
Professors Dicks and D’eon, pictured above receiving the award along with Prof. Barb Morra, detailed the transformations and enhancements made to two of these courses, reducing their environmental footprint while emphasizing the importance of sustainability.
Environmental Fate and Toxicology of Organic Contaminants
CHM310H is an environmental chemistry class that was recently rebranded to provide chemistry students with an appreciation of what happens to chemicals once they are released into the environment.
This class is an important component of the Focus in Green Chemistry as it provides the chemists of the future who will be making materials with the perspective to understand what will happen to those materials at the end of their use.
The class also covers common detrimental effects of environmental contamination, including toxicology, eutrophication, and the ability of chemicals to act as greenhouse gases. Layered onto the content of CHM310H are R programming activities that allow students to explore the partitioning of the 4700 chemicals in the ToxCast database. Student assignments include programming the mass balance equations into a chemical fate model that explores the potential for short chain fluorinated gases—ones commonly used as inhaled anesthetics and refrigerants--to produce persistent oxidation products.
These activities were developed by graduate students Diwen Yang and Brad Isenor through CTFPs funded by a LEAF grant titled “Scaffolding Computation and Data Science Throughout the Chemistry Curriculum” awarded jointly to Jessica D’eon and David Liu in Computer Science.
Feedback from students since the renewal of the class has been overwhelmingly positive with students appreciating the context of the class and the opportunity to develop their programming abilities.
One comment read: “I found figuring out how these numbers related to real world events to be very invigorating and being able to kind of see where it all blends together made it incredibly interesting.”
Organic Synthesis Techniques
CHM 343H was co-designed in 2008 by Rob Batey and Andy Dicks as the capstone of a new undergraduate specialist program in Synthetic and Catalytic Chemistry.
The CHM 343H title purposely avoids any mention of “green chemistry” to avoid creating a perception that topics regarding sustainability will be covered solely in this course and not in other ones.
The laboratory-intensive experience in this class focuses on teaching sustainable chemistry approaches via different cutting-edge catalytic methodologies (often Nobel Prize-winning ones), including innovative experiments requiring a high degree of student input and decision-making. This includes 25% of class time spent specifically covering green chemistry content, including the introduction of a novel industrial-related assignment; and “reflection exercises” built into the laboratory reports of experiments that do not specifically have a green theme associated with them.
These modifications have shaped CHM 343H into a more relevant and robust offering for the teaching and learning of both fundamental and advanced green chemistry topics.
The Department of Chemistry successfully developed the Focus in Green Chemistry undergraduate program to equip students with the knowledge and tools to make responsible, sustainable decisions as future chemists. -UofT Facilities & Services
The above courses are part of the department’s Focus on Green Chemistry Program of Study. The award was presented to Profs. D’eon, Dicks and Morra on March 21, 2025 in the Runner Up – Employee Group Category.
Recognition from the U of T Facilities and Services Sustainability Office serves as a testament to the Department’s efforts to teach chemistry in a sustainable and forward-looking fashion. It also serves as a call to action as instructors make ever greater strides in integrating green practices into Chemistry's curriculum and research, paving the way for a more sustainable future.