Chemists Celebrate Earth Day: Recycling—Chemistry Can! Earth Day is April 22, 2007. In celebration, this issue contains articles on waste management, alternative energy sources, water quality, and a variety of ways to bring environmental chemistry into the classroom. An exciting way to demonstrate environmental chemistry is with biodiesel synthesis (see Rudolph Diesel Meets the Soybean: "Greasing" the Wheels of Chemical Education, News from Online: Renewable Resources, and Biodiesel Synthesis and Evaluation). The cover shows a separatory funnel filled with biodiesel above a layer of glycerol. The flask is superimposed on a soybean field. Soybeans are one source of vegetable oil that can be used as starting material in biodiesel synthesis. The biodiesel products were prepared by Megan Jacobson and Allen Clauss.
Photo of flask by Jerry J. Jacobsen. Field image provided by Michael Forster Rothbart/UW–Madison University Communications.
The cover was designed by Betsy True.
Our Secondary School editors work hard to distill all the JCE materials to produce a fraction of particular interest to high school teachers. We call it CLIC.
In recent years we have worked hard to better match our advertisers with our readers. When shopping for chemistry education materials, visit our advertisers' WWW sites first.
Take JCE along on your outreach missions. Copies of the Journal, guest access to JCE Online, our publications catalog, and more are available for your participants.