Resumen de Student-Driven Development of Greener Chemistry in Undergraduate Teaching: Synthesis of Lidocaine Revisited
Philip Josephson, Viktor Nykvist, Wafa Qasim, Björn Blomkvist, Peter Dinér
Green chemistry and sustainable development have become increasingly important topics for the education of future chemists, but the implementation of green chemistry into the chemistry curriculum requires significant efforts from teachers, especially in laboratory education. A student-driven development of a greener synthesis of Lidocaine was performed by three first-cycle, third-year students as a part of their B. Sc. degree project with the goal to implement the procedure in an under-graduate organic chemistry course. The students were merely provided with the framework for the project and were given the opportunity to independently develop the project based on an analysis of the 12 principles of green chemistry. The “greenification” of the Lidocaine synthesis by the three students led to several green improvements of the standard procedure, for example, (1) decreased reaction temperature, (2) solvent replacement, (3) fewer equivalents of the starting material (diethylamine) by the use of an inorganic bulk base, (4) use of catalytic amounts of potassium iodide to promote the Finkelstein reaction, and (5) a two-step one-pot procedure. Furthermore, one of the developed procedures was successfully implemented in a full-scale organic chemistry laboratory course.
