Preliminary remarks to the articles about evaluation methods
The discussion on sustainability and sustainable development has gained substantial in corporate communication as well as in politics. Meanwhile, the opinions on the best pathway to sustainability differ considerably. This makes it even more difficult to apply the very general concept of sustainability to practical education in organic chemistry.
The following articles show how different evaluative methods have been used during the development of the NOP. Not every method has been applied to every lab experiment, since e.g. an evaluation with EATOS or, even more so, a complete life cycle analysis are time-consuming. However, some experiments have been much more thoroughly analyzed and they form the so-called NOP teaching module ("Lehrmodul").
According to the many different perspectives that belong to an evaluation of sustainability, different evaluation methods have to be applied. Out of these methods, no one is perfect, since no single evaluation can show the way to sustainable development, regardless if it is an economic evaluation, a toxicological statement or something else.
For the experiments making up the NOP teaching module ecotoxicological and toxicological data have been almost comprehensively looked up and the data availability has been classified. All substances are characterized by a short evaluative text, energy efficiency and mass efficiency are available. Finally, an evaluation of their contribution to a sustainable development has been done, resulting in red, yellow or green traffic lights for the experiments. All data are directly accessible from the website of each experiment, or even from the experiments search page.
The NOP is an open forum for newly looked up or produced data, for detailed analyses of the experiments that have been less investigated, for new experiments and of course for discussion of the evaluative statements.
update 23. August 2012