Green Thread Statement
Laurie Franklin
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
November 29, 2010
I revised an assigned research paper for CHMY 302 E, Chemical Literature and Scientific Writing, to
change the focus of research from “evaluation of emerging technologies” to “evaluation of emerging
technologies that address issues of sustainability”. The change was easy to make because the activities
of the new assignment were the same as those of the original: students are asked to conduct research in
scholarly journals to formulate and support a thesis about the effectiveness of a new technology, write a
paper, create an abstract and bibliography, and cite sources.
The students wrote papers with the following titles: Next Generation Biofuels; Treatment of Wastewater
with Constructed Wetlands; Piezoelectricity; Using Waste Materials as Inexpensive Heavy-Metal
Adsorbents; Air Quality: Emissions, Regulation and Innovative Monitoring Techniques; The Future of
Fuel Cells; Comparison of the Nutritional Value of Foods Grown by Organic versus Conventional Farming
Methods; Ethics of rbST Use in Dairy Cattle; Geothermal Energy: Sources, Collection, Efficiency; and
others. The students will make brief classroom presentations of their topics and findings.