The goal of this homework is demonstrate the many types of chemicals that are released into the environment, give the students several chemical names for further investigation, and learn a little about MSDS sheets.
Go to this site TRI , glance around and also look at Tools and then go TRI Explorer. The "TRI Explorer" is tool to sift the EPA data base regarding the quantities of toxic chemicals released to the environment. Use the menu box to choose a state other than Alaska or your current state of residence. Leave the other input boxes at their default, or you can pick an industry sector if you have chosen a large state. After you click on the "generate report" button, you should get a matrix of toxic compounds by the media into which they were released (air, water, land). (Most of these releases, by the way, were quite legal.) You will pick out three chemicals, but I want you to choose chemicals that your are unfamiliar with. The list is in alphabetical order (except that a few chemicals that have a common name that starts with a number). For your first chemical, pick one of the numbered chemicals (other than 1,2,3-trimethy benzene), for the second and third, choose one that starts with the first letter of your first name and one that starts with the first letter of your last name. Select chemicals that you have never heard of. (We are using the initials so the class spreads out, rather than all selecting a chemical that starts with "a," but you can use the next letter or so if you don't find a good chemical with that letter.) I suggest you use your computer's copy function to place the chemical name on a Word document, then copy it again when you need to.
I want you to explore, by direct web searching and also by using the Vermont SIRI site links, to locate MSDS or SDS sheets for one of your chemicals. For at least one of your chemicals, you will find several different MSDS sheets. What we want are two different sheets, one that looks very complete, probably following the ANSI standard or SDS, and one that looks very incomplete or at any rate has much less information than the better one. For the assignment I want you to write a long paragraph about the two sheets, who wrote them, when were they written, the main points of difference between them. Note if the author of the sheets is a laboratory supply company, a manufacturer, or what. Careful, the site where you find the sheet may be a university or supplier, and not the "author" of the sheet. Put the URLs of the locations of the two sheets into your text and set them as a hyperlink. Also, put the names of your other two chemicals after the paragraph. You'll need to do all this in Word. Be sure to save a copy, we will do more with those three chemicals in later modules.
The purpose of this homework is to illustrate a little about MSDS sheets, the difference in quality of MSDS sheets for the same chemical, and give you the name of a chemical that you are probably not familiar with, which we'll do more with latter.