Friends and Colleagues, I have the pleasure of announcing a new web site focused on Green Chemistry -- The St. Olaf College/EPA Green Chemistry Assistant http://fusion.stolaf.edu/gca The Green Chemistry Assistant is more than just a web site -- it is a fully functional web application. The overall objective of the site is to help you analyze chemical processes that you are interested in in terms of Green Chemistry. But you will find, if you explore a little, that the Green Chemistry Assistant is useful far beyond the typical confines of that field. With this web site you can: * do simple green chemistry calculations such as atom economy, theoretical yield, relative excess, experimental atom economy, process mass efficiency, and E-factor. * better organize the "prelaboratory" work associated with carrying out chemical reactions in the student or research laboratory, * graphically analyze a chemical process in terms of a variety of "greenness" measures, * consider the health and environmental hazards associated with a chemical process, * generate "Green Process Analysis Reports" that summarize a process in terms of inputs, outputs, and safety, and * save your work by sending the data and report to yourself or others via email. The Green Chemistry Assistant is primarily geared toward students: * General chemistry students can use this site to learn about basic green chemistry calculations such as atom economy, limiting reactant, theoretical yield, and percent yield. * Organic chemistry students can use this site to prepare "prelab" reports that summarize the number of moles and mass of reactants and products and take into account hazards. * Advanced chemistry students will find this site helpful for obtaining CAS registry numbers as well as physical and safety information relating to over 68,000 compounds from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Green Chemistry Database. While designed primarily for students, we hope that this web application will be an important contribution to both the Green Chemistry and the synthesis/pharmaceutical communities. Of course, we'll be interested in hearing from anyone for whom the site does not behave properly. We believe it is well tested on Windows machines using a variety of browsers; due to the complexity of browser/operating system combinations on Macintoshes, we are less confident that it will work entirely properly on those systems, but we encourage you to try it out and tell us what needs fixing. Enjoy! Bob Hanson -- Robert M. Hanson, hansonr@stolaf.edu, 507-646-3107 Professor of Chemistry, St. Olaf College 1520 St. Olaf Ave., Northfield, MN 55057 mailto:hansonr@stolaf.edu http://www.stolaf.edu/people/hansonr