The Strategy and Implementation of Sustainable and Green Chemistry Education in Taiwan

The Toxic and Chemical Substances Bureau (TCSB), to achieve a better environmental quality and reduce population health risk, start to promote general education of green chemistry (GC) in advanced education system, provide the research funding to academic research on GC, and enhance the partnerships with cross discipline sector, institutes, such as Department of Education and Ministry of Economic Affairs, and industries in Taiwan since 2017.

Based on international green chemistry online courses, experimental methods, and recommendation from local experts, TCSB has developed and proposed a syllabus and a series of online courses for general education of green chemistry in advanced education. At least 12 courses materials, including Introduction to 12 principals of green chemistry, environmental medicine, chemical substances safety, experiment for identifying plastics, life cycle assessment, and industrial ecology and so on, were established and revised by the editorial committee, and available on the TCSB website.

In conjunction with the domestic industries, we visited 30 companies (including chemical substances manufacture, recycling of recycled materials, paper industries, and electronics manufacturing) and conducted the questionnaires to explore the implementation of GC and their needs about labors’ working capability developed from advanced education. Production and process management are most important background knowledge they need. In November of 2018, we held 4 GC general education workshops for college students (n=230) and 2 workshops for GC training for elementary school teachers (n=54). Interesting lectures, such as Definition of Green Chemistry and Introduction to Environmental Susceptibility, Relationship between Chemicals and Environment, Toxicity and Waste Reduction, Green Chemistry Circular Economics and so on were presented.

To provide a platform for college students to join the GC education activities, the Green chemistry Creative Competition for nationwide colleges and universities were initiated in 2017 and the second event will take place in 2020.