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During the 2010 spring National Meeting in San Francisco, ACS hosted an innovative Sustainability Engagement Event (SEE). The SEE brought ACS members and other stakeholders together in support of Goal 3 of the ACS Strategic Plan. Leading up to the meeting, participants submitted creative ideas that would address the world’s sustainability challenges through chemistry. In San Francisco, 31 Sustainability Explorers canvassed the meeting content on the theme of “Chemistry for a Sustainable World” to identify additional ideas. At a kickoff reception on Sunday and during Sci-Mix on Monday, hundreds of meeting attendees learned about the event and the developing ACS sustainability agenda. The 10 most promising ideas were discussed at the forum on Tuesday. Using an appreciative inquiry model and the “six thinking hats,” more than 50 participants reviewed the ideas and developed goals, objectives, timelines, and desired outcomes for each. ACS members and stakeholders are invited to participate in the resulting action teams as they are integrated into the ACS structure and make these projects into a reality:

Linking Chemists with Non-Profit Service Organizations that can Apply their Chemical Expertise This project seeks to engage chemists to work with not-for-profit groups and NGOs that can apply their knowledge of chemistry to provide solutions. The project will investigate ways to strengthen the linkage between these organizations and the chemistry community, so that scientific information and assistance, when needed, can be easily accessed.

How Chemists Can Help with Major Recycling Efforts and Inspire the Public The scope of the project is to provide information on the chemistry of recycling, and to remind the public about its importance. It seeks input on how to increase recycling efforts within communities and would create materials that inform readers the benefits of recycling and the negative effects of not recycling.

Infusing Green Chemistry into the Curriculum This grass-roots campaign would make green chemistry and sustainability into mainstream topics in the training of chemists and would expand the their coverage in textbooks. Another possible outcome is to expand the inclusion of green chemistry in the ACS standardized exams.

Greener ACS Meetings: Your Ideas The goal of this action team is to reduce the environmental footprint of ACS National Meetings. The ACS Committee on Meetings and Expositions has existing efforts in place, so the group would focus on generating novel and innovative ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle.

Sustainable Energy: Developing the Science and Technology This project will focus on how the ACS can engage with corporations and research scientists to advance sustainable energy. Issues that may be discussed include, but are not limited to, the use of fossil fuels, energy shortages, creating excitement around clean energy, and gap analysis on energy conversion and storage.

Suggest Policy Priorities for the ACS to Advocate This group will focus on members’ involvement in shaping and advocating for ACS policies related to sustainability and green chemistry.

Create Positive Viral or Buzz Marketing of Chemistry and Sustainability How can the ACS design campaigns that would excite and entice the public and chemists to adopt sustainable practices?  Methods of communicating the importance of chemistry to sustainability might include social networking, the ACS Chemistry Ambassadors, and using the full weight of ACS in support of word-of-mouth promotion of the nature and value of chemistry in addressing the world’s sustainability challenges.

Incorporating Sustainability into the 2011 International Year of Chemistry Celebration With much of the IYC celebration already organized, this group will seek additional opportunities to promote a more sustainable world using this highly anticipated international platform. It will try to spread the word that chemistry is part of the solution, not the problem, in the world’s sustainability challenges.

Promote and Develop Programs and Materials to Bring Sustainability into K-12 Education This group will investigate ways to incorporate sustainability concepts into the K-12 curriculum. Ideas include providing resources to teachers on how to develop lesson plans, to use social media to disseminate information, and to create a website for educators.

Avoid and Reduce Pollution through Chemistry: Minimizing Waste Streams This project will look at new ways to extract raw materials for chemical processes through reuse and recycling, rather than using virgin materials. Sources of new ideas could include seminars or workshops about industrial ecology and methodologies for reducing waste.

I would especially welcome California Section members to join with me on Team Six, Suggest Policy Priorities for the ACS to Advocate.  We will work with the ACS Committee on Environmental Improvement to develop new policy statements, focusing initially on toxic chemical reform.

Addressing the ideas that have resulted from the SEE requires the creative input of a broad range of stakeholders in the ACS and beyond. The varied backgrounds and experiences of chemists inspire us in different ways to offer workable solutions at the local, regional, and national level.  Please visit the sustainability web site in the coming weeks for more information:

<www.acs.org/sustainability>

You can join the continued conversation that is taking place on the ACS Network to develop the resulting ideas. Working together we can make the ACS vision of “Improving people’s lives through the transforming power of chemistry,” a reality.

Next SF National Meeting is 2014.