Earth Day workshop at the National Science Centre

The National Science Centre arranged a workshop in collaboration with Hindu College, University of Delhi, for the students of classes IX to XII on Friday, 22 April 2022 to mark Earth Day. The resource persons for the session included Prof. Anju Srivastava, Dr Reena Jain and Vijay Shankar Sharma of Hindu College.

The Indian School was represented at the event by 5 students of class IX and their chemistry teacher, Ms Kanika Ralhan.

The session started with a discussion on Basic Chemistry and how it advanced to make life more and more convenient for people. These advancements also led to the indiscriminate release of harmful chemicals into the environment. It further resulted in environmental issues like global warming, acid rain, plastics and now microplastics (having size <5mm).

Prof Anju Srivastava emphasised the need to work toward Green Chemistry by giving the examples of the case of DDT poisoning in 1962, the Thalidomide disaster, the Bhopal Gas Tragedy in 1984, and arsenic poisoning. The philosophy of Green Chemistry indicates the reduction or elimination of chemical waste and minimising the hazardous effects of chemicals on human health and the environment. To take a step towards a sustainable future, Hindu College started the Green Chemistry Network Centre (GCNC).

The session included several experiments demonstrated by Dr Reena Jain. She used the Green Chemistry approach to prepare silver nanoparticles from green tea leaves and extracted limonene from waste orange peel using liquid carbon dioxide. The experiment, the synthesis of biodegradable plastics from cornstarch, grabbed everybodys attention.

The workshop was informative and pushed students to brainstorm ways to prevent the earth from getting more degraded. Such workshops allow children to ponder about solutions to problems that seem to be complicated, like eradicating plastics or the ways of handling chemicals in industries, simply by changing the code of conduct.