The Department of Chemical Engineering's undergraduate teaching labs have been awarded the Green Lab Gold Certificate for the second consecutive year.
Led by John Zhang, lab director, the department’s technical support team has embedded sustainability into how students learn, experiment and work, improving the education experience and reducing waste.
Located in the Douglas Wright Engineering Building, the labs achieved the distinction through three initiatives: recovering and reusing expensive chemicals and solvents rather than discarding them; installing a reverse osmosis water recirculation system expected to save approximately 250 cubic metres of water per year; and expanding a suite of virtual labs and open educational resources. Among those tools is a 360-degree virtual tour of the department's continuous distillation pilot plant — the only one of its kind in Ontario — which reduces chemical use and utility demand by giving students a chance to explore complex operations before entering the physical lab. The resource is freely available to chemical engineering programs worldwide.
"We are reimagining what sustainability education for engineers can look like," says Dr. Mario Ioannidis, chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering, "following an approach that goes beyond curricular changes at the graduate and undergraduate level to touch every aspect of student experience."
The Green Lab Gold Certification is awarded through Waterloo's Green Labs program, which evaluates how labs manage chemicals, utilities and everyday operations and encourages continuous improvement.
Go to Reducing the environmental cost of lab work for the full story.