Sustainability Assessments in the Classroom: CRA, LCA, TEA, Oh My!

By Julian R. Silverman (SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology/ACS) ... These days, assessments, especially across the central science, may focus on having students explore the economic, environmental, and social impacts of decisions made in the production of chemicals. Between life-cycle assessments (LCA), techno-economic assessments (TEA), and chemical risk assessments (CRA), there is a lot to learn and teach to prepare students to source, make, use, and dispose of the next generation of chemicals and materials. In this short piece, we will explore why these assessments are so relevant today and how to distinguish their many different goals and outcomes based on their setting and the problems they address.

Distinguishing Sustainability Assessments

The first thing to note is that these assessments may differ in form and practice depending on the context in which they are used. For example, social considerations for a risk assessment for a single laboratory may focus on personal protective equipment, whereas a risk assessment for a community may address vulnerabilities across a large population. With that said, it is easy to see how each assessment broadly relates to different green principles and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). Broadly, these different types of assessments cover the economic, environmental, and social considerations that determine whether an ingredient, reaction, product, process, or facility is sustainable or not.

Here, we will examine how they are relevant to post-secondary curricula and try to show, despite their complications, how the insights we derive from these assessments are valuable and help us extend concepts like a synthetic product’s yield in the laboratory to real-world ideas like process mass intensity, which addresses both products and waste. Beyond this, the skills students learn when investigating and performing sustainability assessments collect and connect foundational knowledge across science and engineering, extending it to other disciplines like business and design.

Broadly, all of these assessments use diverse sources of input data alongside quantitative methods to generate information using specified metrics. Each assessment might use different source data, like where a CRA often draws from safety data sheets, and a techno-economic assessment uses pricing and market data of feedstocks and reagents. All of these methods benefit from data transparency from manufacturers and suppliers, and will no doubt be supported by future initiatives like Digital Product Passports, which will become a standard for how consumer products are assessed across Europe in the near future.

Assessments Across Disciplines

For educators looking to incorporate these practices into their curricula, there are many good places to start. In addition to the resources linked above, there are easily adoptable activities, in-depth background resources, guides for educators, and open-access resources you can use in your courses, as well as easy-to-use software to discuss these ideas across platforms. While there are many places to begin, perhaps the best are online repositories like Beyond Benign’s Green Chemistry Teaching and Learning Community (GCTLC), where you can find resources but also chat with other educators working on and interested in these topics. The question is no longer whether we should include sustainability assessments in our classrooms, but how we will effectively integrate them into our practice. READ MORE