Education at all levels within green chemistry is fundamental to equipping the next and current generations with the skills and competencies to facilitate the transition of chemical and allied industries towards a more sustainable future. Through a coordinated and holistic systems-based approach, targeted educational interventions can be implemented with key stakeholder groupings, leveraging highly active and context-based learning pedagogies, to engage and train personnel and consumers to operate more sustainably. This chapter details transferable examples that can be adopted in a range of environments to equip the current and next generations of scientists, engineers and policymakers with the tools to practice green chemistry and act as changemakers by empowering those around them with this approach to doing chemistry.

The Department of Chemistry at the University of York, UK has been at the forefront of green chemistry education initiatives for several decades. As the MSc programme in Green Chemistry and Sustainable Industrial Technology celebrates the 25th cohort of students graduating in Summer 2026, this manuscript celebrates this milestone through showcasing the integration of green chemistry education into curricula at all levels at Chemistry at York from outreach in primary and secondary schools to undergraduate and postgraduate instruction through to delivering continuing professional development training to those working in the chemical and allied industries. The impact of becoming a signatory of the Green Chemistry Commitment via Beyond Benign is also highlighted. Through outlining the educational approach at Chemistry at York, it is envisaged that aspects of the portfolio of activities designed to support green chemistry instruction are transferrable for other institutions to adopt, no matter what stage of curriculum development they are at. Potential future directions for green chemistry education are also discussed in recognition of the evolving curriculum and ethos to transition away from an optional enviornmentally-focused idea to green chemistry acting as a core lens to be used when practicing chemistry.

In this Voices piece, contributors explore how chemistry education must evolve to support circularity. Coming from multiple contexts and perspectives, contributors highlight that chemistry education should be moving beyond yield, performance, and disposal toward systems thinking, life-cycle awareness, ethical responsibility, and design for reuse, regeneration, and long-term impact.

A simple and creative communication assessment activity to share green chemistry research via a visually appealing infographic has been devised. This represents the continuous form of assessment for an optional module in green chemistry as part of the undergraduate degree programme at Chemistry at York. Through associated digital skills training to accompany lectures in green chemistry, students are allocated a research article that is linked to the taught content where they work in groups to interpret and summarise the manuscript. Students then create their own individual infographic and associated list of key points, making links to lecture course content and overarching sustainability frameworks such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the 12 Principles of Green Chemistry. Students also critically evaluate how green the research is that has been reported and what green improvements could be made. This assessment is relatively easy to integrate into curricula and has been completed by over 200 students since 2019 and has attracted positive feedback, relating to enjoyment, links to research, contextualisation of course content and developing scientific communication skills.

Strong partnerships with students are critical to curriculum development and research. This can foster a culture of continual improvement with educational and societal benefit.

An interactive and free-of-charge online platform, The Biorefinery Experience, was created using Xerte, a flexible template for creating interactive learning objects. Through this accessible site containing videos with transcripts and a range of questions to engage users, a systems thinking approach has been adopted to outline holistic and interconnected considerations in the design of a first-generation sugar cane biorefinery. Systems oriented concept map extension diagrams have been used extensively to assist learners in visualizing links between biorefineries to social, economic, and environmental interfaces. Users also design their own biorefinery using real data and then redesign a biorefinery as a function of time, demonstrating holistic system understanding, retrospection, and prediction. The Biorefinery Experience was implemented with 35 undergraduate students. Survey feedback demonstrated an enjoyable way to learn about biorefining while utilizing a whole systems approach, allowing students to consider real problems relating holistically and temporally to grand challenges (such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals).

The Journal of Chemical Education announces a call for papers for an upcoming virtual special issue on Action for Climate Empowerment in Chemistry Education.

A laboratory experiment was designed to provide students with an introduction to byproduct valorization by producing an analogue of biodiesel (fatty acid ethyl esters, FAEE) via lipid extraction and subsequent transesterification from spent coffee grounds (SCG). Valorization is the process of upgrading underutilized or discarded wastes or byproducts into chemicals, materials, and (bio)energy. Upon isolation of the intermediate and FAEE, students analyzed the respective spectroscopic characteristics using infrared and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy as well as evaluated gas chromatography spectra that were provided. Associated green metrics for the reaction were determined to obtain a quantitative measure of the "greenness students are introduced to key concepts such as whole systems thinking and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals where they apply these frameworks to real-world problems such as consumption and waste disposal. In addition to providing a greener alternative to traditional methods for biodiesel analogue production from SCG by solvent alterations, this experiment demonstrates the value of waste that would otherwise be overlooked to generate products that can help reduce the continued use of finite fossil fuels. " of the experiment. In this laboratory experiment,

TOWARDS A MULTICULTURAL AND GLOBAL EDUCATION: STUDENTS CREATING EDUCATIONAL BIOREFINERY VIDEOS WITH INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION

A simple experiment was developed to introduce students to the sustainable procurement of water through fog harvesting that can be used for drinking or irrigation purposes. Access to clean water and sanitation is problematic particularly within dry regions such as in areas of Peru, although there is a significant amount of fog in the mountainous areas of the country. By taking a whole systems approach, fog can be considered as a renewable feedstock, captured through a fog harp, condensed, and collected as water. This experiment enables students to construct their own device for fog harvesting and measure how effective it is at collecting water in comparison to other peer groups that work to construct devices with varying number of threads that make up the fog harp. Students perform such a comparison by plotting a graph of water collected as a function of thread count. Students also establish connections to relevant United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) and the 12 principles of green chemistry. Therefore, this simple experiment can serve as a basic introduction to sustainability, embracing a shift to a more circular economy, through utilizing fog as a renewable feedstock to collect water.

A laboratory experiment was developed to introduce systems thinking and green chemistry concepts through the synthesis of the antidepressant and smoking cessation aid, bupropion hydrochloride. The traditional synthesis has several issues from a green chemistry perspective: it uses the toxic solvents N-methylpyrrolidinone (NMP) and dichloromethane (DCM) and other hazardous chemicals including bromine and 12 M hydrochloric acid resulting in 138 kg of waste per kg of product. A greener synthesis has been developed with suitable improvements to the traditional procedure. The reprotoxic NMP and potentially carcinogenic DCM solvents have been substituted with the green biobased solvent Cyrene and ethyl acetate, respectively, and bromine has been substituted with N-bromosuccinimide. An alternate extraction method has also been developed using 1 M hydrochloric acid and ethyl acetate rather than 12 M hydrochloric acid and diethyl ether. These changes have also reduced waste by 92 kg kg(-1), and the resultant experiment is much safer to perform. As part of this laboratory experiment, students synthesize bupropion hydrochloride, and the adaptations to the traditional process are discussed and evaluated. Students are also introduced to the green metrics of atom economy, process mass intensity, and E-factor, which they use to quantify the greenness of the original and adapted procedures.

Research suggests that systems thinking is beneficial to education and it has been proposed that training students using systems thinking techniques may enhance their abilities to understand and solve some of the global grand challenges that society currently faces as outlined by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. However, before systems thinking can be incorporated into chemistry education, the perceptions of the instructors who would adopt this framework must be investigated. Therefore, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 instructors from the Department of Chemistry at the University of York. Responses were analysed using both qualitative (framework method) and quantitative (Likert-style) techniques. The instructors expressed positive opinions of systems thinking as all participants stated that systems thinking techniques should be implemented into the undergraduate chemistry curriculum to some extent. Examples of anticipated advantages to integrating systems thinking into curricula include benefits to student learning, the facilitation of interdisciplinary teaching/learning, enhanced student employability prospects, and societal benefits. Research has suggested that curriculum reform is only successful with support from instructors and so these positive opinions of systems thinking from participants with expertise from a variety of areas within chemistry show great promise for future implementation.

Green Tycoon is a free-of-charge game-based mobile application that embraces a systems thinking approach to introducing students to a biorefining process model within green chemistry. Players adopt the role of a manager in a chemical factory, synthesizing the fictional compound, Yorkanone. Through upgrading the system and engaging with the integrated quiz, players can learn fundamental green chemistry principles while appreciating some of the considerations in biorefining. Green Tycoon was implemented with 33 undergraduate students where survey feedback demonstrated that the game was engaging and innovative and was a helpful tool to appreciate the importance of green chemistry when designing chemical processes. On the basis of pretest and post-test questions to evaluate learning gain, Green Tycoon proved to be a useful resource to introduce students to green chemistry and its role in moving toward a bioeconomy. Design of the mobile application serves as a useful example of what an upper-division undergraduate student with no coding knowledge can achieve through a chemistry education research project.

TikTok is a social media video-based phone application which enables creative and engaging videos to be shared on social media platforms worldwide. TikTok has been applied to create fun, exciting, and engaging 15-60 s long chemistry outreach educational videos, to encourage public dissemination of science with a systems thinking approach. With the creation of an online TikTok account called "The Chemistry Collective" by undergraduate students, 16 educational videos were created, with approximately 8,500 views. Upon surveying participants, viewers of these TikTok videos strongly agreed that they had learned something new about chemistry since watching these videos (4.66/5.00) and had an increased interest in chemistry (82.7% agreed). As such, TikTok can be used to enhance public and undergraduate student engagement with chemistry and science education, together with facilitating the ability of the public to understand how chemistry can be fun, can be performed at home, and is part of our daily lives.

This overview outlines the recent progress made in addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals through educators incorporating systems thinking approaches within green and sustainable chemistry education. A blend of programme-level and course-level approaches to embedding systems thinking into teaching is discussed together with more specific resources such as practical experiments and use of technology-enhanced and game-based learning strategies. To maximise global applicability, an emphasis has been placed on making such teaching interventions transferrable with case studies included to illustrate this. There is scope remaining to build on these case studies to create a portfolio of implementable resources that can be integrated within chemistry and related programmes at all levels from school to professional training courses.

This pioneering activity led by the University of York (UK) and the University of Zaragoza (Spain) has connected Chemistry students with Chemical Engineering students from the former and the latter University, respectively, to work together on the design and development of new bio-refinery concepts. In particular, students worked in pairs (one student from each University) to make a poster and two flash presentations (one in English and other in Spanish) covering the following areas: citric waste valorisation, crude glycerol upgrading, marine plastics pollution remediation and spent cooking/automotive oil valorisation. For this purpose, students were exchanging e-mails, arranging and having virtual `Skype' meetings as well as posting their works on social media over six weeks. These activities helped students to consider entire systems in order to solve a problem where there are interdependencies and may be dynamic in nature. By taking this systems thinking approach, this pioneering activity has helped the students transition from a reductionist understanding of green chemistry, sustainable chemical engineering and related areas to a holistic deep understanding of a biorefinery concept, which is more integrated. In addition, the results also suggested that working in international pairs increased students' awareness about the existence of intrinsic sociocultural differences between them, largely related to language and culture. In particular, Spanish students had to overcome a language barrier, as they are non-native English speakers; while British students realised that they had to adapt/moderate their language when talking to non-native English speakers, avoiding the use of dialect and slowing down their speech during the meetings. Furthermore, students realised that collaborative work is not done in the same manner all around the world, a fact that was clearly evidenced when it came to the division of labour and arranging meetings. The assessment of the posters and presentations revealed that most of the students did great work; the posters were not only extraordinarily well written, but also innovative and eye-catching. The study and careful evaluation of the surveys conducted pointed out that the integration between Chemistry and Chemical Engineering helped students to be mindful about how a problem can be solved from different, but complementary perspectives, thus promoting peer-learning and increasing students' motivation. Overall, all the students were very receptive to work with partners from a foreign institution and they found this experience challenging and exciting. Hence, as this activity can be applied to many educational settings, we believe that this pedagogical project clearly contributes towards the development of a global and multicultural education, which may boost the sociocultural and co-operative skills of the students of the present and professionals of the future.

Organic Fanatic is a free-of-charge quiz-based mobile application game that encourages students to test their abilities and enhance their learning of organic structure and reactivity through a fun, arcade-style interface. Students can attempt a total of 270 multiple choice questions, choosing from a possible 1080 associated answers that can be selected from 9 different functional group categories at varying difficulties. The game can be played in single player mode as part of independent learning or in multiplayer mode, facilitating student interaction. Organic Fanatic was provided to first-year undergraduate students studying chemistry, biochemistry, or natural sciences degree programs as a resource following all organic chemistry teaching but ahead of the examination period. Students found Organic Fanatic to be an innovative and enjoyable resource where they could learn organic chemistry through play and via the convenience of using their smart phones. Such an interactive resource has shown to be a useful component to facilitate a blended learning environment in organic chemistry instruction.

A demonstration was developed to introduce students to waste valorization in order to form bioplastics. Waste valorization is the process of reusing, recycling, or composting, from waste, useful products or sources of energy. In this demonstration, waste valorization is introduced by converting sour milk into a bioplastic via the addition of lemon juice upon heating. Utilizing lemon juice to perform the acidification offers a greener procedure than the traditional formaldehyde (used commercially to make galalith) and enhances the transferability in remote locations such as the Amazon Rainforest in comparison to vinegar. Students can establish connections to relevant United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) by adopting a systems thinking approach. However, through this, it is noteworthy that this process is also used (particularly in the Indian subcontinent) to make paneer, a farmer cheese. While this also enables students to make a link to additional UN SDGs pertaining to "zero hunger", there is an ethical discussion to be had as to whether such a process that is utilized to feed malnourished citizens should be used to make a decorative bioplastic. As such, despite this demonstration being transferrable, instructors may consider carefully whether to utilize this resource, and, if so, to use this as an opportunity to teach the importance of ethics in science.