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» Turn Trash to Treasure


Simmons does more than just talk the talk about greening its campus; the community also walks the walk. Assistant Professor Rich Gurney of the Simmons chemistry department has been instrumental in bringing "green chemistry" to campus over the last four years, and his students have taken his crusade to both the national and international arenas.

One of Gurney's students, senior Jennifer Boice, has been championing her "Cups to Cleaners: Trash to Treasure" project for the last year. The project highlights a biodegradable plastic made of polylactide (PLA), out of which the cups recently introduced in the Fens cafeteria are made. Boice developed a method to convert the discarded cups into a "green" cleaner to remove lime scale and soap scum in the college's bathrooms.

"Being a part of this project was such a great experience," Boice said. "Not only have I been able to learn more about organic chemistry, but I've also learned the implications of our actions as a society from the green chemistry standpoint. This project has motivated many of us to discover a solution for making our campus more 'green.'"

This year, senior Christina King has been working in collaboration with Assistant Professor of Biology Elizabeth Scott to study the antimicrobial properties of the cleaner and to develop concurrently a laboratory experience for microbiology classes. The project has now expanded to include a total of 12 undergraduate researchers in the chemistry department.

The Cups to Cleaners project has sparked a collaboration with a professor in Argentina, Dr. Debora Martino at the Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnologico para la Industria Quimica at the Universidad Nacional Litoral in Santa Fe, Argentina. She has invited three Simmons undergraduates to work on the synthesis, characterization, and modeling of a new "green" polymer this summer in Argentina. The students are scheduled to bring their research back to Simmons to continue it during the 2008-09 academic year.

Here in the United States, Professor Gurney was one of 10 educators nationwide invited last summer and granted a stipend to fund his participation at a "Green Chemistry in Education" workshop in Washington, D.C. While there, Gurney also attended the International Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference, where he presented two papers that highlighted the strong contributions of Simmons students in both the research and teaching labs on campus over the last four years. His contributions to the field are summarized in the book State-of-the-Art Green Chemistry Education, published in January 2008 by the American Chemical Society.