By hosting a college students' laboratory skills contest, we provide an interesting activity for students to cultivate good laboratory practices and thereby improve their laboratory skills. The substance of this contest is the detection of the hardness of water, which involves numerous laboratory skills such as solution preparation, weight by…

The undergraduates in the major of Environmental Science and Environmental Engineering frequently ignored the importance of identifying pollution sources for water environment monitoring and knew little about the techniques of identifying pollution sources. Thus, a laboratory experiment which focused on pollution sources identification in a water…

Removing the pollutants from various wastewater is crucial to the environment, ecology, and humans. However, the pollutants are generally removed by chemical decomposition, which not only consumes a lot of energy but also produces carbon emissions. Electrochemical flocculation is effective to extract pollutant molecules and heavy ions from…

Recently, smart sensing/actuation paper has attracted significant interest due to its potential usage as a sustainable component in future electronics, robotics, and intelligent sensing devices. In acknowledging the importance of this topic for the engagement of students at the university level in conjunction with Industrial Revolution 4.0, it is…

Safe and high-quality water is essential from both the health and environmental perspectives. Water quality is so important that the United Nations has included water in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Thus, the adequate control and treatment of water are necessities. These tasks must be…

Millions of people do not have access to clean drinking water; thus, cost-efficient water treatment systems are vital. Chemists, environmentalists, technicians, and engineers will be the professionals making breakthroughs in this industry. This laboratory experiment aims to introduce undergraduate students to the removal of pollutants from water…

In this laboratory experiment, students explore the aquatic photochemical fate of ranitidine and cimetidine, two common pharmaceutical pollutants found in wastewater. It provides an engaging environmental context for students to develop knowledge of reaction kinetics and photochemistry as well as skill in using analytical instrumentation. This…

This laboratory experiment introduces students to an important reaction in biomass valorization and allows them to gain a practical understanding of green chemistry. Acid-catalyzed dehydration reactions of fructose to 5-hydroxymethylfurfural and thus humins were performed both with and without aqueous solvent, along with two different catalysts…

The contamination of wastewater with metals and the use of biotechnologies to remove them is commonly discussed in theoretical biology, microbiology and biotechnology classes aimed at undergraduate students. This work introduces an easy, economical and safe practical laboratory class related to this topic. The practice consists in performing batch…

Sustainability is emerging as a prominent curricular initiative at the undergraduate level, and as a result, involving students in real-world problems in the classroom and laboratory is an important goal. The specific problem of a dwindling supply of clean and safe drinking water is also of utmost importance and relevance. This general chemistry…

A laboratory experiment that involves the synthesis, characterization, and application exploration of a metal-organic framework (MOF) has been developed for first-year undergraduates in the Faculty of Engineering at National University of Singapore. The desired MOF material was prepared from commercially available reagents in a facile…

This experiment combines analytical techniques of solid-phase extraction (SPE) and gas chromatography quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC-QTOF-MS) to determine organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) in river water as a means to develop and improve student understanding of the use of GC-QTOF-MS for qualitative and quantitative analysis. In…

In this guided-inquiry lesson, students were tasked with determining the efficacy of an at-home drinking water filter at removing lead (Pb) from tap water using graphite furnace atomic absorption spectroscopy by determining the concentration of lead before and after filtration. The lesson was structured to allow students to choose and perform…

A newly developed laboratory learning program for high school chemistry courses is discussed, in which students discover the chemical mechanism governing exothermic phenomena during the reaction between a heating agent, namely, calcium oxide (CaO)--aluminum (Al) mixture, and water. Based on prior knowledge of simple heating agents such as CaO, the…

We describe a 2 h general-chemistry experiment that introduces college students not only to the concepts, synthesis, and applications of nanomaterials at an early stage but also the use of a spectrophotometer for quantification and unknown determination based on Beer's Law. The procedure involves students (1) preparing a nanocomposite by…