Abstract
“Greening” a chemical transformation is not about only changing the nature of a solvent or decreasing the reaction temperature. There are metrics enabling a critical quantification of the efficiency of an experimental protocol. Some of them are applied to different sequences for the preparation of paracetamol in order to understand their performance parameters and elucidate pathways for improvement.
Highlights
As largely emphasized during the recent United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP21 [1]) held in Paris (France), nowadays there is an increasing awareness and urgent necessity of limiting, as far as possible, any source of pollution and accumulation of waste
In many papers you can read that environmentally friendly protocols have been developed to improve known reactions or to access original compounds. Are those protocols as green as claimed? Do they really follow the principles of Green Chemistry? Are they characterized by favorable metrics, having in mind that any amount of a substance that is not incorporated in the final product will become a waste if it cannot directly be reused? This year, the ACS Green Chemistry Institute will organize, in Portland (OR, USA), the 20th Annual Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference [3]
Global reaction mass efficiency [19,20], seldom referred to as mass productivity (MP) [20], corresponds to a mass balance for the chemical process in its entirety. It is the ratio between the isolated weight of the final product and the sum of the weights of all materials entering in the reaction, including solvents, drying agents, washing solutions, and any other compound implemented during the experiment [21]: gRME “ isolated weight of the desired product{sum of weights introduced in the process
Summary
As largely emphasized during the recent United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP21 [1]) held in Paris (France), nowadays there is an increasing awareness and urgent necessity of limiting, as far as possible, any source of pollution and accumulation of waste. The publication of the Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry by Anastas and Warner in 1998 [2] has undoubtedly been the most efficient tool for the development of chemical procedures aiming to limit the amount of waste and to protect the environment. Extrapolation of those concepts to the industrial world can be found in the Twelve Principles of Green Engineering, disclosed in 2003 by Pharmaceuticals 2016, 9, 26; doi:10.3390/ph9020026 www.mdpi.com/journal/pharmaceuticals. Real-time analysis for pollution prevention Analytical methodologies need to be further developed to allow real-time, in process monitoring and control prior to the formation of hazardous substances
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