Hi Jeannie Kornfeld,
Your project is a very much needed one and I encourage you to develop it fully.
I served as a K-12 science education consultant, have been actively engaged in state science and social studies education standards, writing and presenting curriculum, past President of the Alliance for New Jersey Environmental Education (ANJEE), past commissioner with North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE).
I might suggest that your chemistry and environmental science/systems thinking curriculum include reference and systems models similar to Michael Baumgartner and William McDonough's Cradle to Cradle concept. Baumgartner's work on chemistry was the starting point for this program. Maintaining a material/chemical reuse loop might make a worthy exercise for your students. Linking these loops together in a cooperative way for multiple industries or business would be a good advanced student project, and one that would be good for student college admission portfolio or job interviews.
John Todd's work on biological remediation of "wastewater" could also be of interest too. While the process is generally referred to as a "Living Machine", it is chemistry that is conducted by a carefully designed series of technical and biological means working in a balanced system to create pure drinking water and other useful products out of wastewater. A more complex version of this is the closed ecological life support systems (CELLS) for long-term space missions such as MELiSSA. The outcomes of this chemistry driven research and systems thinking will benefit our macro-view of sustaining life on earth as Climate Change and other changes confront the human species in years to come.
The search for an environmental battery might stimulate an interesting chemistry and systems thinking model. You might consider including Vanadium Redox Flow Battery among the potential options. When this chemistry approach is coupled with a social arrangement where the fluid is recharged at a fixed location by solar panels/wind/hydro, the charged fluid is pumped into a car, and the discharged fluid is drained from the car (just prior to fill up), and the customer pays for the energy charge and the service of pumping it out of the car battery pack and into the car battery pack. This provides an interesting series of systems for modelling that are based chemistry and social considerations.
I look forward to updates and news as you go along with your project.
Best regards,
Michael Skelly