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General Education Sprout Project for Green Chemistry and Safe Alternatives Initiative

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This project aims to promote green chemistry development in Taiwan through education, safer alternative chemical, and green finance. For primary education, we established more than 6 types of environmental education materials for primary schools, completion of green chemistry promotion in 10 primary schools in the northern Taiwan, more than three hundreds of participants, and organized 4 green chemistry seed training camps for primary school teachers, about one hundred and sixteen teachers participated. For advance education, we established 8 green chemistry general education teaching materials. We received 237 questionnaires from students who took the lesson, and over 80% students agreed that they can gain some knowledge about green chemistry. We also assisted 6 institutions to set up green chemistry-related courses. We held the second Green Chemistry Creativity Competition for Universities and Colleges. There are 46 participating teams from 27 schools and 40 departments and institutes, including materials engineering, chemistry, chemical engineering, environmental engineering, occupational safety and health, and science education. To link with industry and education, we collected industry-academia collaboration information and research contents, and the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) has the most diverse types of industry-academia cooperation programs for researchers in Taiwan. We designed and set up a webpage to promote the concept of green chemistry and share the related information to the general public. We also analyzed the international trend of green chemistry development, collected the information of international green chemistry conferences from 2018 to 2020. We also participated in the 2020 American Chemical Engineering Conference on-line activities. In order to reduce the hazardous chemical substances to the domestic environment and population health, this study evaluated the effectiveness of safer alternative chemical, listed a domestic chemical substance safety substitution assessments, and develop the procedures and steps for evaluating safer alternative chemicals, including the 7 Principles: (1) identifying the problems, (2) searching for potential alternative substances, (3) hazard assessment of alternative substances, (4) functional assessment of alternative substances, (5) life cycle assessment of alternative substances, (6) selection of suitable alternative substances for test programs, and (7) formal implementation and feedback. By the 2020, the 12 items of chemical substances, were identified and recommended as the first-tier alternative chemicals for their current use in 6 types of consumer products, such as food container packaging materials, textile products, building and decorative materials, automotive and assembly parts, household cleaning products, electronic equipment products. We interview the chairmen of various industries and collected industrial information to compile two annual reports (2019 & 2020 annual report), including the environmental benefits of green chemistry practices by the 1st Green Application and Innovation Award winner. To understand and encourage industries to voluntarily reduce process chemicals through green financial measures, an overview of the current chemical substance management costs in four countries, namely U.S., Germany, France, and Japan, were collected and compiled, in addition, to explore current measures to internalize chemical substance management costs in Taiwan; moreover, the regulations, environments, and industrial needs for the introduction of international measures into Taiwan were evaluated as well. We also analyzed domestic chemical safety management and promotion systems and contents in line with green chemistry, and evaluated the benefits of incorporating green chemistry principles or safe alternative strategies into relevant standards for the promotion of green chemistry in the industries. International cases of chemical leasing, including Egypt, Siberia and Sri Lanka, were collected and analyze to develop 10 successful international case presentations, and we examined whether the applicability of chemical leasing and proposed strategies suitable for Taiwan's development and promotion of chemical leasing. We established a preliminary framework for green chemistry guideline, organized the tasks of the related sectors in charge of the management of chemical substances in Taiwan, including Environmental Protection Administration, Ministry of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Labor, Minister of Health and Welfare, Ministry of Education, Council of Agriculture, and nine associated bureaus. We also completed a framework for the relationships between Taiwan's chemical substance management authorities and green chemistry principles.
Keyword
green chemistry, education promotion, industrial analysis
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