The International Year of the Periodic Table of Elements provided a perfect opportunity to implement community engagement activities that re-position the public image of chemistry, from one that currently suffers from the consequences of large-scale uptake of its previous successes such as plastic waste and polluting industrial plants, to one that has embraced the principles of sustainability. This project took the Periodic Table of Elements as an organising principle, and developed activities to increase understanding of the Table itself and the importance of chemistry to sustainability. Hands on visits at schools in disadvantaged areas allowed maximum impact on a large number of students.
Using the grant generously provided by the Australian National Commission for UNESCO, we were able to offer our ‘Periodic Table of Sustainable Elements’ outreach event at no cost to seven regional and rural schools, where over 1000 students took part. Over 80 of these students took part as ‘student leaders’, where they were involved for the whole day, either mentoring younger age school students undertaking the experiments, or being mentored themselves by Deakin university student volunteers who discussed with them post-secondary education opportunities in STEM.
All resources from the events are freely available to all interested parties on our ‘Elements of Sustainable Chemistry’ website. We anticipate growing our outreach event to incorporate a greater breadth of experiments, so we can continue being able to demonstrate in schools the important role chemistry is taking in meeting the grand challenges of sustainable development. The list of people and institutions to thank is very long and so won’t be repeated here, but if you go to page 16 of the report, you can read the whole list there 🙂
But we must really thank the Australian National Commission for UNESCO for their financial contribution to this project and to this website, and without their financial support this really would not have been possible.
