At the recent ACS National Meeting in Boston I attended a symposium on global climate change. The first speaker challenged educators to provide better background for students to understand the science of the atmosphere and climate. In a democracy, that seems absolutely essential, but how many of us are really including these things in what we teach? There is so much to teach and so little time to teach it. How can we find time to discuss things like chemical reactions in the atmosphere, absorption of infrared radiation by molecules, and many other topics that relate to issues our society faces?

I was reminded of this when I ran across an article from the New York Times titled “Europe Finds Clean Fuel in Trash; U.S. Sits Back”. In Denmark trash is a clean source of energy. In the U.S. it goes into landfills. Granted, the latter may eventually become the mining sites of the future, but what a waste of waste! We could be using that energy now. Also, the usage of energy in Denmark, where trash incinerators are located in residential communities, is an excellent adjunct to discussions of entropy and Gibbs energy–the waste heat from the incinerators is piped to houses surrounding them and provides heating in addition to the electricity generated by the plant.

Understanding thermodynamics is essential to understanding why the incinerators make sense. Lack of such understanding is likely to lead to suspicion that the experts don’t have it right, which seems endemic to political discussion in the U.S. at this time. The inability to comprehend science seems to permeate our society, which is a serious indictment of science education in the U.S. (It is probably a good deal more serious than the low scores by U.S. students on international standardized texts, which are usually quoted to indicate how bad things are.)

Another aspect of the New York Times article is that other countries are developing the technologies of the future and we are not. Despite our “wide open spaces”, which make it easier to landfill out of sight of most of the public, waste to energy plants make more sense (a 2009 study by the EPA strongly favored such plants over landfills for non-recyclable waste on the basis of  reducing greenhouse gas emissions, alleviating local pollution, and providing home-grown energy). Eventually waste to energy is going to be recognized as a much better long-term solution, but the U.S. is going to be behind in development and likely will need to license from other countries technology that could have been developed here and could have contributed to our GDP instead of Denmark’s or some other country’s.

Improving science education (and specifically chemistry education) has far-reaching, long-term effects. We are concentrating too much on short-term gains (both in the classroom and in society at large) to the detriment of gains that will benefit our children and their children. That’s really unfortunate. We can do lots better.

Energy and Recycling