Chemical Engineering and Society

1. Period 1: Presentation slides 1-8 (the two jackets, targets, natural resources, what synthetic means, the petroleum-to-plastic flow, first vocabulary, sort check). W1 phenomenon worksheet opens the period; W2 vocabulary relationships closes it.
2. Period 2: Lab 1, the unlabeled swatch mystery (one session). Groups test six swatches for water beading, water uptake by mass, wrinkle recovery and fiber look, then argue which are natural. Follow with slide 9 (the petroleum family) and reveal the swatch identities.
3. Period 3: Slides 10-13 (timeline of synthetic materials, the wartime discussion, structure and properties, structure check). W3 reading passage on Bakelite, nylon, synthetic rubber and PET, in class or for homework. W4 diagram worksheet on the resource-to-product trace.
4. Period 4: Slides 14-19 (gasoline versus ethanol, the California connection, sweeteners and additives, second vocabulary, the paclitaxel story, the renewable-but-not-unlimited discussion). W5 data worksheet on simulated cup breakdown and energy data; W7 misconception repair.
5. Period 5: Lab 2, the spring-fair cup decision (one session). Groups read eight information cards, score four materials on shared criteria and defend a choice. Slide 22 task can be the warm-up or the debrief. W6 CER on the biodegradable-cup question follows as individual work.
6. Period 6: Slides 20-21, 23-24 (plastics' success and new problem, the design cycle, the criterion-or-constraint check, judging sources). Lab 3 session 1: write criteria and constraints for a produce bag and test candidate materials. W8 collaborative jigsaw on sources of synthetic materials fits here if Lab 3 is shortened.
7. Period 7: Lab 3 session 2: build, test, compare designs across groups and revise. Slides 25-27 (misconception, synthesis, exit). W9 transfer task as an alternative to the build for groups short on time; W10 mastery as the quiz.

Materials overview: No open flames and no hazardous chemicals anywhere in the chapter; the classic fabric burn test is deliberately left out. Lab 1 uses fabric swatches (cotton, wool felt, jute or burlap, polyester, nylon, acrylic felt), water, droppers, tweezers, hand lenses and a balance. Lab 2 uses printed information cards and a scoring matrix. Lab 3 uses kraft paper, newspaper, cotton muslin, polyester fabric from old garments, plastic film cut from reused grocery bags, wax paper, tape, string, scissors and weights for load testing. The jacket phenomenon can be shown with any real and faux leather items or described from the chapter text.

• Multilingual learners: Pre-teach natural resource, synthetic, polymer, criteria and constraint with picture cards that show the resource on the left and the product on the right; allow the swatch identifications in Lab 1 to be spoken before they are written; provide the Lab 2 cards with key terms bolded and a bilingual word list.
• Students who need more support: Give Lab 1 a partly filled evidence table with the expected pattern for one known swatch, provide a two-column origin chart (petroleum / living things) for W4, and supply sentence frames for the CER ('The cup should be ___ because the card says ___, which matters because ___').
• Students ready for extension: Ask them to find out how PET bottles are turned into polyester fleece and what limits that recycling, to compare the energy balance debate over corn ethanol using two sources with different conclusions, or to research how paclitaxel is now produced in plant cell culture and why that counts as greener chemistry.
• Students who need movement or alternative output: Run the natural-or-synthetic sort as a four-corners activity with product cards; let Lab 3 prototypes be judged in a walking gallery; accept the Lab 2 decision as a 90-second recorded pitch instead of a paragraph.
• Students with limited fine-motor control or low vision: Provide larger swatches and a partner to handle the tweezers in Lab 1, high-contrast large-print information cards for Lab 2, and let a teammate do the cutting and taping in Lab 3 while the student directs the design and records the test results.

• How petroleum formed: the lesson says 'millions of years' in one place and 'hundreds of years' in another. Petroleum took millions of years to form from the buried remains of tiny marine organisms, mostly plankton. Never say hundreds of years.
• What 'synthetic' means: the lesson summary says a synthetic material does not occur in nature, but the vocabulary box and the sapphire example define it by how it is made. Teach the production definition: made by chemical processes from natural resources. Lab-grown sapphire and synthetic vanillin are chemically identical to the natural versions.
• Gasoline is refined, not synthesized: the lesson calls gasoline a synthetic material and speaks of mining petroleum. Crude oil is drilled and pumped; a refinery separates it by boiling point and also cracks large molecules into smaller ones, then blends the streams. Gasoline is a processed mixture; keep it out of strict natural-or-synthetic sorting and describe it as 'refined from petroleum'.
• Coal is not a mineral: the lesson lists coal among minerals. Coal is an organic sedimentary rock formed from ancient plant remains. Use gold, iron ore or salt as mineral examples.
• Ethanol fermentation: the lesson says scientists ferment glucose 'in corn'. Corn kernels store starch; enzymes first break the starch into glucose, then yeast ferment the glucose, producing ethanol and carbon dioxide (C₆H₁₂O₆ → 2 C₂H₅OH + 2 CO₂). Yeast do the chemistry; people run the process.
• Ethanol's energy balance: the lesson states as fact that making ethanol takes more energy than it gives back. Published USDA estimates since the 1990s find corn ethanol returns more energy than it uses, and the balance depends on farming and distilling methods. Teach that the answer is measured, debated and depends on method, and never assess either side as fact.
• Corn used for ethanol is not entirely lost to food: ethanol plants return part of the corn as dried distillers grains, a major livestock feed. Say 'competes with food and feed', not 'cannot be used as feed'.
• Sweeteners and health: the lesson says a person with diabetes can use sucralose without worrying about high blood sugar or other medical problems. That is health advice and an overstatement. Say only that zero-calorie sweeteners let people enjoy sweet tastes while limiting sugar and calories, and that regulators reviewed their safety before approval (FDA approved sucralose in 1998).
• Paclitaxel is a natural compound: the lesson calls it a synthetic material. Paclitaxel itself was extracted from Pacific yew bark (first collected in 1962 during a National Cancer Institute plant screening program). The needle-based method extracts a related compound from European yew needles and converts it into paclitaxel by chemical steps, which is semisynthesis. Later, a manufacturer switched to yew cells grown in culture tanks, recognized by a 2004 EPA green chemistry award.
• Pacific yew figures: 'bark of up to six trees per patient' and 'a century to mature' are rough historical estimates; present them as estimates. The species also grows inland in the northern Rockies, not only along the Pacific coast.
• Aspirin's origin: the lesson says aspirin is made from a substance in willow trees. Willow bark contains salicin; chemists made acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) by modifying salicylic acid, which Bayer sold from 1899, and the starting compound can be synthesized from smaller molecules. Say aspirin was inspired by willow, not made from it.
• PLA's properties: the lesson says PLA's chains let objects be bent and squeezed without breaking, with a water bottle as the example. PLA is fairly stiff and brittle at room temperature; PET is the usual bottle plastic. Say that long chains give plastics strength and let thin pieces flex, and that how far a plastic bends before cracking depends on which plastic it is.
• Biodegradable depends on conditions: the lesson says PLA needs a facility that keeps it heated 'for several days'. Industrial composting of PLA takes weeks to months; a common standard is 90 percent of the carbon converted to carbon dioxide within 180 days. PLA does not break down in a landfill, a backyard pile or the ocean on any useful timescale, and it contaminates PET recycling streams.
• Bio-based is not the same as biodegradable: the lesson contrasts petroleum plastics with biodegradable plastics as if plant origin caused biodegradability. Some plant-based plastics (bio-PET) do not biodegrade, and some petroleum-based ones (PBAT) do. Biodegradability depends on the chemical structure, not the source.
• Fast breakdown in a landfill is not a pure good: landfills become oxygen-poor, and the bacteria that break down waste there release methane, a strong greenhouse gas. Many landfills capture some of it. Present 'breaks down in a landfill' as the textbook's design criterion, and raise the methane point in discussion.
• Cost is a constraint: the lesson lists 'inexpensive' among the new criteria for plastics. In NGSS usage cost is usually a constraint (a limit), while criteria describe success. Lab 3 and W9 keep the two separate.
• Recycling claims: in the United States, roughly 9 percent of plastic waste was recycled in 2018 according to EPA figures, and the rate for PET bottles alone was higher but still under a third. Avoid implying that putting plastic in a blue bin guarantees it becomes a new product; what is accepted and actually processed varies by community.
• Synthetic rubber history: natural rubber comes from the latex of the rubber tree, grown mostly in Southeast Asia. During World War II the United States lost access to most of that supply and built an industry making styrene-butadiene rubber; in 1943-44 most of the butadiene came from alcohol fermented from grain and the rest from petroleum, and after the war petroleum became the main feedstock; today more than half of the rubber used worldwide is synthetic. Natural rubber is still preferred for some uses, such as aircraft tires, because of its properties.
• Historical dates used in this chapter: Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic, was developed by Leo Baekeland in 1907 from phenol and formaldehyde; nylon was first made by Wallace Carothers' team at DuPont in 1935, went on sale as toothbrush bristles in 1938 (the year DuPont announced it publicly, in October) and as stockings nationwide from May 1940; early nylon stockings cost about what good silk ones did, so chapter materials do not call them cheaper; polyester (PET) was first made by Whinfield and Dickson in England in 1941; PET soft-drink bottles followed Nathaniel Wyeth's 1973 patent and were common by the late 1970s; saccharin was discovered in 1879 and became popular during World War I sugar shortages; sucralose was discovered in 1976; large-scale PLA production began in the early 2000s.
• OCR note: the chemical formulas on pp. 187-188 lost their subscripts in the text file. The printed pages read glucose C₆H₁₂O₆, sucrose C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁ and sucralose C₁₂H₁₉Cl₃O₈, which match reference databases.