Green Chemistry for a Sustainable Future

For more than three decades, Green Chemistry has provided a framework for chemists and chemical engineers to do their part in contributing to the broad scope of global sustainability. American Chemical Society journals are a great venue for these scientists to share their latest results and provide a resource to the chemistry community and beyond for understanding current problems and envisioning solutions. Sustainability in organic chemistry, especially in organic synthesis, has been driving innovation for decades. With the amount of waste generated in many synthetic chemistry routes, especially at scale in manufacturing, we are faced with not only an ethical imperative to develop more sustainable chemical processes and products but also a financial imperative. Metrics to gauge our progress, including process mass intensity PMI , have been developed that allow all aspects of a process to be compared. For example, conducting a reaction in water may not necessarily be an improvement if several volumes of an organic solvent are needed to extract purify the product. One could even argue that water can be problematic because its high boiling point makes recycling energy intensive, but we do not know these details without consciously thinking about them. A recent perspective highlights the need to explicitly include the assessment of sustainability using Green Chemistry metrics. Dr. Mahesh Singh Khirwar "Green Chemistry for a Sustainable Future" Published in International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN: 2456-6470, Volume-6 | Issue-5 , August 2022, URL: https://www.ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd50676.pdf Paper URL: https://www.ijtsrd.com/chemistry/other/50676/green-chemistry-for-a-sustainable-future/dr-mahesh-singh-khirwar