Insights on ecological spectroscopic techniques recently adopted for pharmaceutical analysis: A comprehensive review from the perspective of greenness assessment metrics systems application

Abstract

In terms of sustainable development, green analytical chemistry plays a great role on minimizing all analytical chemistry operations' detrimental effects on the analyst safety, human health and on the whole environment. Many of the reported analytical methods are supposed to be eco-friendly by their authors. However, such claim requires adequate rationale by the implementation of greenness assessment metrics systems. The evaluation of greenness is crucial for determining its feasibility in developing sustainable techniques. Consequently, assessing the greenness of analytical approaches is becoming more and more important in order to evaluate their effect on the environment and show if they can be implemented in a way that is sustainable. Techniques for non-destructive spectroscopy provide analytical information without harming the sample, and in most instances, sample preparation is not necessary. This is, in Green Chemistry's opinion, the most significant benefit of nondestructive spectroscopy. Additionally, non-destructive spectroscopy may make it possible to analyze multiple analytes simultaneously; saving time and reagents, by carrying out so all at once in the same process of analysis. Furthermore, chemometrics has obviously a great impact on designing experiments and optimization in the green approach. Thus, spectroscopic techniques currently prevail the discipline of green analytical chemistry. The goal of this review is to keep up with the progress of introducing green analytical chemistry into multi-component pharmaceutical analysis using non-destructive spectroscopic techniques. Consequently, this review provides for the first time a summary of the recent spectroscopic methods evaluated using different green approaches. Some appropriate green assessing tools were used to evaluate the presented spectroscopic methods before being claimed as “green methods”. Novel spectrophotometric and spectrofluorimetric methods; developed for multi-component pharmaceutical analysis, are described in this review whose greenness assessment was proved by their authors with metrics systems by applying the green evaluation tools.