Topic 10: Using resources – GCSE AQA Higher Chemistry revision notes

What this topic covers

Topic 10: Using resources has 4 subtopics:

• Using the Earth's resources and obtaining potable water
• Life cycle assessment and recycling
• Using materials (chemistry only)
• The Haber process and the use of NPK fertilisers (chemistry only)

Topic 10: Using resources lessons by subtopic

27 lessons, grouped by subtopic.

Using the Earth's resources and obtaining potable water

• What is Potable Water and How Do We Make It?: Learn what makes water safe to drink, the difference between potable and pure water, and the main processes used to produce potable water in the UK including filtration and sterilisation.
• Water Treatment for Different Sources: Explore the different methods needed to treat ground water versus salty water, including desalination processes like distillation and reverse osmosis when fresh water supplies are limited.
• Why We Need New Methods to Extract Metals: Explore why Earth's metal ore resources are limited and discover innovative biological methods like phytomining and bioleaching that can extract metals from low-grade ores without traditional mining.
• Processing and Evaluating Alternative Metal Extraction Methods: Learn how to process metal compounds obtained from biological extraction methods into pure metals using displacement and electrolysis, and evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of these alternative methods.
• Physical Treatment of Waste Water: Learn about the initial physical processes used to treat waste water, including screening to remove large debris, grit removal to eliminate sand and small stones, and sedimentation to separate sewage sludge from effluent. Understand why urban lifestyles and industrial processes produce large amounts of waste water that need treatment.
• Biological Treatment of Waste Water: Explore the biological processes used in sewage treatment including anaerobic digestion of sewage sludge and aerobic biological treatment of effluent. Compare the relative ease of obtaining potable water from different sources including waste water, ground water and salt water.
• Earth's Resources and Human Needs: Explore how humans use Earth's resources for basic needs, understand the difference between finite and renewable resources, and examine natural vs synthetic products.
• Data Analysis and Sustainable Development: Learn to interpret resource data from charts and graphs, use orders of magnitude to evaluate data significance, and understand sustainable development principles.

Life cycle assessment and recycling

• The Four Stages of Life Cycle Assessment: Learn about the four key stages that make up a life cycle assessment: extracting and processing raw materials, manufacturing and packaging, use and operation during lifetime, and disposal at end of useful life including transport and distribution at each stage.
• Challenges and Limitations of Life Cycle Assessment: Explore the difficulties in making LCAs objective, including the challenge of quantifying pollutant effects versus easily measured factors like water and energy use, and how selective LCAs can be misused for advertising purposes.
• Comparing Shopping Bags: A Practical LCA: Apply life cycle assessment principles by carrying out a simple comparative LCA between plastic and paper shopping bags, evaluating their environmental impact across all four stages.
• The Three Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Explore how reducing use, reusing items, and recycling materials helps conserve limited resources and reduce environmental impacts. Learn why materials like metals, glass, and plastics come from limited raw materials and how extraction affects the environment.
• Recycling in Practice: Glass and Metals: Investigate real examples of recycling including how glass bottles can be reused or crushed and melted into new products, and how metals can be recycled through melting and recasting. Examine how recycling processes vary depending on material separation requirements.
• Evaluating Resource Reduction Strategies: Develop skills to evaluate different methods of reducing the use of limited resources by analyzing case studies and data. Apply knowledge to assess the effectiveness of various reduce, reuse, and recycle strategies in different contexts.

Using materials (chemistry only)

• Types of Polymers and Their Production: Learn about how different types of poly(ethene) are made from ethene and understand the structural differences between thermosoftening and thermosetting polymers.
• Glass and Clay Ceramics: Explore the production of different types of glass (soda-lime and borosilicate) and understand how clay ceramics like pottery and bricks are made.
• Material Properties and Composites: Compare the properties of different materials including ceramics, polymers, composites and metals, learn about composite structures, and understand how to select appropriate materials for specific uses.
• Common Alloys and Their Properties: Explore the composition and everyday use of common alloys including bronze, brass, steel types, gold alloys and aluminium alloys, understanding why most metals we use are actually alloys rather than pure metals.
• Analysing Alloy Compositions and Applications: Develop skills in interpreting data about alloy compositions and evaluating their uses based on properties, applying knowledge to unfamiliar alloys and real-world scenarios.
• Understanding Corrosion and Rusting Experiments: Explore what corrosion is and investigate through experiments how both air and water are essential for iron to rust, interpreting results to understand the conditions needed for rusting to occur.
• Preventing Corrosion Through Barrier Methods: Learn how corrosion can be prevented using barrier coatings such as greasing, painting and electroplating, and discover how aluminium naturally protects itself with an oxide coating.
• Sacrificial Protection and Galvanising: Understand how sacrificial protection works using the reactivity series, focusing on how zinc galvanising protects iron by acting as a more reactive sacrificial metal.

The Haber process and the use of NPK fertilisers (chemistry only)

• NPK fertilisers and their importance: Learn about the essential elements in fertilisers (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium), what NPK fertilisers are, how they improve agricultural productivity, and the industrial processes used to manufacture them using various raw materials.
• Processing phosphate rock to make fertilisers: Discover how phosphate rock is mined, why it cannot be used directly as a fertiliser, how it is treated with different acids to produce soluble salts, and learn the names of the specific salts formed with nitric, sulfuric and phosphoric acids.
• Industrial vs laboratory production of fertilisers: Compare and contrast how fertilisers are produced on an industrial scale versus in the laboratory, examining the differences in methods, equipment, and scale of production for the same chemical compounds.
• Introduction to the Haber Process: Learn what the Haber process is, its purpose for making ammonia and fertilisers, the raw materials needed (nitrogen and hydrogen), their sources, and the basic reaction conditions including the reversible reaction equation.
• Equilibrium and Rate in the Haber Process: Understand how dynamic equilibrium applies to the Haber process, interpret graphs showing how reaction conditions affect rate, and explore the trade-off between production rate and equilibrium position that influences commercial conditions.

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