Resumen de Waste Treatment in the Undergraduate Laboratory:: Let the Students Do It!
JOhn J. Nash, Jeanne A. R. Meyer, Susan C. Nurrenbern
There are numerous reports in this Journal that describe procedures for treating various types of wastes generated in research labs as well as in undergraduate teaching labs (1 - 11). However, relatively few reports describe direct student involvement in the waste treatment process (12 - 18). Including well-designed waste treatment "experiments" as natural addenda to laboratory experiments that generate hazardous waste could provide students additional opportunities to apply chemistry to "real" problems. Moreover, such waste treatment-type experiments might be used to stimulate discussions regarding the hazards and environmental issues associated with the disposal of chemical wastes at both the academic and industrial levels. We were prompted by the paper of Schneider and Wiskamp (18) to present the details of a waste treatment experiment that we have recently incorporated into our large (ca. 2400 students per year), second-semester general chemistry course.
