Evaluating the environmental impacts of analytical chemistry methods: From a critical review towards a proposal using a life cycle approach

Abstract

In the past twenty years, analytical chemistry scientists have developed tools to assess the “greenness” of their analytical methods. The purpose of this work is to review these tools against criteria inspired by the life cycle assessment (LCA) framework. Results show that the reviewed tools are ready- and easy-to use but they are also limited in their scope, and base their rankings on subjective weighting scheme. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of LCA to overcome the limits found in the reviewed tools. We show that LCA is complementary to existing tools as it provides quantitative and holistic information on the environmental performance of analytical chemistry methods. However, conducting LCA is time consuming, requires expertise and cannot be applied routinely. We finally establish key challenges for the application of LCA in the field of analytical chemistry.