Green, Sustainable, and Unified Approaches towards Organic and Inorganic Analytes Extraction from Complex Environmental Matrices

Preparing the sample is a vital procedure involving liquid and solid handling approaches toward extracting, enriching, and identifying target analytes from complex environmental matrices. Thus, there is a need for more effective quantitative investigation and green evaluation procedures better than the conventional techniques for the accurate assessment, optimum selection, and testing of analytical techniques. To achieve greenness in analytical methodology, performance criteria such as design procedures, quantities of safe solvent (ionic liquids (IL), deep eutectic solvents (DES)) /toxic reagents consumed, utilization of renewable, reusable and recyclable materials/ biomolecules were evaluated. In this review, economical and eco-friendly approaches are proposed towards an agreement with the novel principles of Green Analytical Chemistry (GAC) using the combination of figures, colorations, unified 0–1 scale, and graphical illustrations: these include National Environmental Methods Index (NEMI), Analytical Greenness Calculator (AGREE), Analytical Eco-Scale (AES), Green Analytical Procedure Index (GAPI) and Pictograms like Hexagon (H) amongst others. These metric tools were proposed and generally adopted to directly assess a systematic and comprehensive improvement of green sample pretreatment, preparation for different extraction, and recovery methods from various modes. These tools are also aimed at evaluating the sustainability of the methods through figures of merits, carbon footprint, and other GAC tools by assigning penalty points (0 to 4) for each block and hexagonal pictograms that provide an easy comparison between analytical procedures