From Cups to Cleaners: Chemistry Students Develop New Way to Recycle
Assistant Professor Rich Gurney of the chemistry department has been instrumental in bringing green chemistry to campus over the last four years, and his students have taken his crusade to both the national and international arenas.
One of Gurney’s students, senior Jennifer Boice ’09, has been championing the “Cups to Cleaners: Trash to Treasure” project for the last year. The project highlights a biodegradable plastic made of polymer of lactic acid (PLA), out of which the cups recently adopted in the Fens cafeteria are made. Boice developed a method to convert the discarded cups into a “green” cleaner to remove lime scale and soap scum in the College’s bathrooms.
This year, senior Christina King ’09 has been working in collaboration with assistant professor of biology Liz Scott to study the antimicrobial properties of the cleaner and to concurrently develop a laboratory experience for microbiology classes. The project has now expanded to include a total of 12 undergraduate researchers in the chemistry department, including five original senior theses.
“Being a part of this project was such a great experience because not only have I been able to learn more about organic chemistry, but I have also learned the implications of our actions as a society from the green chemistry standpoint,” said Boice. “This project has motivated many of us to discover a solution for making our campus more ‘green.’”
Boice and King hope to patent their discovery and develop a business plan for it as well.
The Cups to Cleaners project has sparked a collaboration with Dr. Debora Martino of the Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnologico para la Industria Quimica at the Universidad Nacional Litoral in Santa Fe, Argentina. Three Simmons undergraduates have been invited to work on the synthesis, characterization, and modeling of a new “green” polymer in summer 2008 in Argentina. The students are scheduled to bring their research back to Simmons to continue over the 2008-9 academic year.
Here in the U.S., Gurney was one of 10 educators nationwide to be invited and granted a stipend to fund his participation at a Green Chemistry in Education workshop in Washington, D.C. last summer. While there, Gurney also attended the International Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference where he presented two papers that highlighted the strong contributions of Simmons students in both the research and teaching labs on campus over the last four years. His contributions to the field are summarized in the book State-of-the-Art Green Chemistry Education, which was published in January 2008 by the American Chemical Society.