Welcome to the first newsletter from the Centre for Green Chemical Science! As part of our programme of continual development and improvement of the Centre,we have decided to issue regular newsletters by email to keep members informed of events and new developments related to the Centre. The newsletters will also be posted on our web site:
http://www.greenchemistry.auckland.ac.nz/en.html
New Deputy Directors
To help spread the large workload that is involved in running the activities of the Centre, we have appointed 3 Deputy Directors; A/Prof John Sperry, Dr Ivanhoe Leung and Dr Viji Sarojini. They have all been heavily involved in our most recent projects.
Our first Green Chemistry Conference
A major recent event for our Centre was to organise and run the first major Green Chemistry conference in New Zealand. This “Green Chemistry New Zealand” conference was hosted at the University of Auckland during 8th – 9th of December. The conference featured 100 scientists from 15 different countries in Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America and South America. International Green Chemical Science experts, Prof. Philip Jessop (Queen’s University, Canada and Editor of the Journal “Green Chemistry”), A/Prof. Ning Yan (National University of Singapore), Dr Lauren Heine (Northwest Green Chemistry, USA) and Professor Amy Prieto (Colorado State University, USA), presented plenary lectures. In total, there were 4 keynote lectures, 26 selected oral presentations and 34 poster presentations. The conference was highlighted in an article that featured on the “Pure Advantage” web site (see http://pureadvantage.org/news/2018/02/08/green-chemistry-and-technology-conference/ for full details).
The poster prizes were sponsored by the Royal Society of Chemistry journals Sustainable Energy & Fuels and Green Chemistry. They were judged by Prof. Prieto, who is a member of the advisory board of Sustainable Energy & Fuels, and Prof. Philip Jessop, who is the chair of the editorial board of Green Chemistry.
Congratulations to the winners of the poster prizes:
RSC Sustainable Energy & Fuels Poster Prize
Stephen Lo (The University of Auckland) – with A/Prof. David Barker and Dr Bruno Fedrizzi
Poster #22 – Derivatisation of Flavonoids Extracted from Food Waste
RSC Green Chemistry Poster Prize
Ram P. Bhusal (The University of Auckland) – with A/Prof. Jonathan Sperry
Poster #4 – A Sustainable Approach for the Synthesis of Valued Added Nitrogen Heterocycles
Organisation of the conference was led by Jon Sperry and Ivanhoe Leung. Congratulations to you both for doing such a great job! We intend to make this conference a bi-annual event.
BSc Green Chemistry Specialisation at the University of Auckland
Another project that has been absorbing much of our time and energy recently is the development of a BSc Green Chemical Science “specialisation”. A “specialisation” is essentially the new University terminology for what was previously known as a “programme”. Viji Sarojini, has been leading our efforts in this area. The development of this project has just reached a major milestone and we will provide more details of this exciting development in our next newsletter.
Interesting snippets
- The cost of recycling electronic waste (E-waste) – now competitive with mining ore: (Environm. Sci. Technol. 2018, https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.7b04909)
- Making acrylic acid sustainably by dehydrating lactic acid: (ChemBioEng 2018, 5, 34–56, https://doi.org/10.1002/cben.201700012)
- Perovskite solar cells: design, composition, ion migration andperformance: (Nanoscale 2018, https://doi.org/10.1039/c8nr00180d)
- Nice graphical portrayal of global warming over the last 100 years: https://www.facebook.com/IFeakingLoveScience/videos/2166971159990550
- And to put the last 100 years in perspective, an interesting time-line of global warming over the last 20,000 years: https://xkcd.com/1732/
James Wright
June 2018