Recent Trends in Green Chemistry: A Bibliometric Analysis of Materials and Innovations

This study analyzes green chemistry research trends in chemistry education. This study used a quantitative bibliometric approach. The number of publications analyzed is 104 publication documents from 2019 – 2024. This research collects, processes, and filters information in Scopus journals and articles. Metadata results show that the distribution of publication frequency peaked in 2019, with 26 documents identified. The green chemistry research area is dominated by chemistry research (31.3%). The country with the most documents and the most productive in publishing green chemistry is the United States, with 30 papers identified. At the same time, Indonesia is ranked fifth as the most productive country in publishing green chemistry, with 10 documents identified. Canada ranked second with 17 papers, and Germany ranked third with 15 documents. The institutions that contributed the most came from Germany: the University of Bremen, with 11 papers 10.58%, and the University of Toronto with 8 documents (7.69%). The authors with the most citations are Chen Tse-Lun et al., with 245 citations. Meanwhile, when viewed from the number of documents published by the author, Eilks I. has 11 papers with a contribution of 4.91%. There are 5 clusters with the most popping keywords: green chemistry, human, and chemical reaction. Research and publications on this topic have been sparse in the past five years. Surveys and analyses of green chemistry literature are essential because tracking research trends in green chemistry in chemistry education is vital to directing the future.

Objective. This paper presents an overview of Green Chemistry research from 1990 to 2017, identifying its specialties, comparing their relative importance, and inferring emergent trends.
 Design/Methodology/Approach. Co-citation analysis of 14,142 documents retrieved in Web of Science by CiteSpace software, using network analysis to describe research fronts by clustering, their relevance by clusters indicators, and emergence by citation burstiness.
 Results/Discussion. Sixteen clusters were found and then grouped into six big specialties. Some specialties are more persistent and general (e.g. GC Characterization, Metal Catalysis, and Microwave Activation) and others are more recent and focused (e.g. Deep Eutectic Solvents). Mechanochemical and Photochemistry are emergent trends in Green Chemistry.
 Conclusions. This paper presents a more quantitative/objective panorama of GC research, comparing the relevance of research fronts inside the field, and helping future researchers and decision-makers in further developments of GC. CiteSpace showed some limitations in clustering. Data collection was hurdled by changes in the Keyword Plus algorithm in Web of Science and by the lack of authors keywords in main journals of the field. Although large, the dataset was restricted to the Web of Science database.
 Originality/Value. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first quantitative analysis of research specialties of GC. It advances past peer evaluation of the field by using indicators and metrics to describe the emergence, extension, and decay of specialties.

Green Chemistry is a relatively new emerging field that strives to work at the molecular level to achieve sustainability. The field has received widespread interest in the past decade due to its ability to harness chemical innovation to meet environmental and economic goals simultaneously. Green Chemistry has a framework of a cohesive set of Twelve Principles, which have been systematically surveyed in this critical review. This article covers the concepts of design and the scientific philosophy of Green Chemistry with a set of illustrative examples. Future trends in Green Chemistry are discussed with the challenge of using the Principles as a cohesive design system (93 references).

Recent years have seen a disheartening string of revelations in which everyday items once considered safe—food packaging, toys, clothes, furniture, electronic components, and many more products—are found to contain carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, and other harmful chemicals.1 Growing demand for healthier alternatives, already seen in food production and housing construction,2 is also happening at the building-block level of manufacturing, where so-called green chemistry represents a revolutionary change in preventing pollution and health problems starting at the chemical design stage. Many industry and government entities are beginning to espouse the principles of green chemistry on their websites and in public statements. Now comes the task of crafting policy to put those principles into action. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines green chemistry as “the design of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use or generation of hazardous substances. Green chemistry applies across the life cycle of a chemical product, including its design, manufacture, and use.”3 Green chemistry also aims to mitigate the type of uncertainty Alan Gold-berg, a professor of toxicology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, recently described to The New York Times: “I can get [toxicity] information on only 20 percent of chemicals we interact with on a daily basis.”4 Of that 20%, he now says, he may be able to find information on overt toxicity for about half, but for details on specific effects such as developmental neurotoxicity, the figure shrinks toward zero. So what does green chemistry look like? Consider the example of pregabalin, the active ingredient in the neuropathic pain drug Lyrica®. Pfizer developed an alternative green-chemistry process that converted several steps of pregabalin synthesis from use of organic solvents to water. That reduced both health hazards and production heating requirements. With the new synthesis, waste from the process dropped from 86 kg of waste per kg product to 17 kg, and energy use dropped by 82%.5 Proponents say that’s how the field can offer a win–win–win solution: good performance, lower cost, and less environmental impact—what Richard Engler, program manager of the EPA Green Chemistry Program, calls the “triple bottom line.” For many, a standard is a logical next step. “At some point you have to go beyond a definition and principles,” says Engler. “I think that’s something the standard will enable.”

Green Chemistry has emerged as a transformative approach within chemical sciences, emphasizing the design of environmentally benign materials, safer processes, and sustainable industrial technologies. Unlike traditional chemistry that manages pollution post-formation, Green Chemistry focuses on preventing the creation of hazardous substances at the molecular level. This review explores major advancements in green solvents, catalytic technologies, renewable feedstocks, and energy-efficient synthetic methodologies. Special emphasis is placed on the increasing industrial applications in pharmaceuticals, agriculture, polymer science, and clean energy sectors. The discussion also highlights current global challenges and future opportunities associated with sustainable chemistry. The review concludes that Green Chemistry now plays a crucial role in shaping eco-friendly manufacturing and offers promising prospects for achieving long-term environmental sustainability

The pressing global challenges of pollution, resource depletion, and climate change. This abstract provides an overview of modern approaches in green chemistry, focusing on key principles and practices that are transforming the way we design, produce, and use chemicals. Several critical keywords are highlighted to better understand the evolving landscape of green chemistry, including sustainable synthesis, renewable feedstocks, catalysis, atom economy, and eco-friendly processes. By adopting these approaches, researchers and industries are striving to minimize the environmental impact of chemical processes and develop innovative solutions to safeguard the planet for future generations. This abstract serves as a primer for exploring the latest developments and trends in green chemistry, offering valuable insights for those committed to sustainable and responsible chemistry practices.

Environmental issues are increasingly of global concern. The trend of sustainable development requires chemistry to be “clean” or “green.” In the 1990s, therefore, the concept of “Green Chemistry” was proposed, together with the “Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry.” These twelve principles encompassed the premise of green chemistry but mainly focused on the aspects of synthetic chemistry. For green chemistry in the analytical laboratory, the concept of Green Analytical Chemistry was subsequently proposed, but it has not yet become a popular field of chemistry. Apparently, green analytical chemistry is a key part of green chemistry and an important trend in analytical chemistry in modern society. It is an emerging area of increasing importance both in green chemistry and in analytical chemistry. In this report, green analytical chemistry is systematically discussed and then defined with seven principles. Firstly, the aspects of green analytical chemistry are discussed in detail with regard to the whole analytical process; i.e., from sample collection, sample preparation, to sample analysis, and some other related issues such as process analysis. Secondly, some naturally green or possibly green analytical techniques are discussed. Presently, spectroscopic methods dominate the area of green analytical chemistry. The purpose of this report is to arouse more attention to green analytical chemistry to serve the sustainable development of the modern society.

Chapter 4 - Application of green chemistry for environmental remediation

Among various green chemistry aspects, selection of catalysts for smooth running of a particular reaction with optimum yield is an important part of the chemical process. In addition to develop novel catalytic systems (homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts) including nanomaterials and polymer grafting, still there is a tremendous scope in screening commercially available low-cost and less-toxic agents that can carry out an organic transformation of choice in an efficient manner under eco-friendly conditions. Synthetic chemists are engaged to explore this area of interest as one of the current trends in green chemistry, and as a result many such simple chemical entities have now appeared as promising catalysts in effecting a considerable number of organic reactions. Sodium formate is a low-cost commercially available substance which is reported as a less-toxic substance. We have recently demonstrated for the first time that sodium formate can be used as an efficient catalyst for smooth running of some organic transformations under eco-friendly conditions. This article sum-ups our experimental results on the catalytic efficacy of sodium formate as an eco-friendly catalyst in case of certain organic transformations of interest.

New trends in green chemistry

We are grateful to Environmental Health Perspectives for implicitly embracing green chemistry as a field with profound connections to the environmental health sciences. We also commend the efforts of Wilson and Schwarzman (2009) to create greater transparency and accountability around chemicals of concern. We take issue, however, with their approach to key scientific concepts and terminology—specifically their effort to change the definition of “green chemistry.” Precision in terminology is paramount for science to function; all parties to a scientific discussion must share the same set of definitions for knowledge to advance effectively. In their review, Wilson and Schwarzman (2009) ignored the original and current definition of green chemistry, which for almost two decades has been recognized as a scientific discipline within the field of chemistry. Defined in the early 1990s by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (2009) as “the design of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use or generation of hazardous substances,” green chemistry is now guided by a set of 12 principles (Anastas and Warner 1998) that are used in both research and teaching in chemis try laboratories around the world. Based on these principles, dozens of universities around the world teach green chemistry as a science. Seven graduate programs offer degrees in green chemistry. Two established peer-reviewed scientific journals focus specifically on research in green chemistry. The impact factor of the journal Green Chemistry (published by the Royal Society of Chemistry) has increased from 2.5 to almost 5 over the past 5 years. More than 1,500 articles on green chemistry have been published in the scientific literature over the past 15 years. Rather than embracing green chemistry’s widely used scientific definition, Wilson and Schwarzman (2009) instead conflate science and policy: The laws governing the chemical enterprise help define the incentives and disincentives that guide economic behavior in the market …. We use the term green chemistry in this context: as an analytical framework that encompasses both the science of safer chemistry and the laws and policies that will motivate its development and adoption by society. This conflation brings with it two risks. First, it undermines clarity in scientific communication, something that is especially important as the fields of environmental health and green chemistry attempt to establish cross-disciplinary collaboration. Such collaborations are likely to prove vital for both fields. Second, it saddles the intellectual and scientific enterprise of green chemistry with policy and, potentially, political baggage, as considerations of chemical policies unfold in the political arena. We are most certainly not arguing that the science of green chemistry should not inform chemical policies. Science and policy will be more effective, however, if political actors do not muddy accepted scientific terminology in service of a political/policy agenda, no matter how noble.

Neoteric solvents, particularly ionic liquids (ILs) and ionic liquid crystals, have emerged as transformative alternatives to conventional organic solvents, addressing critical environmental and sustainability challenges in chemical processes. This review elucidates the necessity of green solvents amid escalating solvent waste—exceeding 26 million tons annually—and highlights ILs' tunable physicochemical properties, including low vapor pressure, high thermal stability (up to 400°C), wide electrochemical windows, and designer versatility through cation-anion combinations. We detail IL synthesis via quaternization and metathesis, classification (e.g., 1-alkyl-3-methylimidazolium systems), and properties enabling applications in electrochemical devices (supercapacitors, lithium batteries, DSSCs), organic synthesis (Diels-Alder, Heck reactions), extraction technologies, pharmaceuticals, gas handling, renewable energy, waste recycling, and advanced fluids. While ILs enhance process green metrics through recyclability and selectivity, challenges like toxicity and cost persist, underscoring the need for biocompatible variants and scalable production. Ionic liquid crystals, with stimulus-responsive anisotropy, show particular promise for energy storage electrolytes. This overview advocates broader adoption of ILs to advance sustainable chemistry, alongside emerging alternatives like switchable solvents.

Is there a role for green and sustainable chemistry in chemical disarmament and nonproliferation?

The expanding progression of industrial development has been a pioneer for world economic growth. Green chemistry has been defined as ‘the employment of techniques and methodologies that reduce or eliminate the use or production of feedstocks, products, by-products, solvents, and reagents that are harmful to human health or the environment’. The quality-by-design approach is well-known in the pharmaceutical industry, and it has a great influence on analytical methods and procedures. In the green method of chemistry, the core consideration is directed towards the design of a material or the chemical procedure; four of twelve principles are associated with design, e.g. designing fewer hazardous chemical syntheses, designing harmless chemicals and products, designing for energy effectiveness, and designing for degradation. One of the most active fields of research and development in green chemistry is the establishment of analytical methodologies, leading to the beginning of so-called green analytical chemistry. The influences of green chemistry on pharmaceutical analysis, the environment, the population, the analyst, and companies are discussed in this review, and they are multidimensional. Every selection and analytical attitude affects both the end-product and everything that surrounds it.

Researchers are engaged in exploring new ecological solvents for different applications, in accordance with the current trends in green chemistry and green engineering. This study is focused on the development of stable emulsions using eco-friendly ingredients, such as two green solvents as dispersed phase (N,N-dimethyl decanamide and α-pinene) and a nonionic polyoxyethylene glycerol ester derived from coconut oil as emulsifier. α-Pinene is a renewable essential oil that could find numerous agrochemical applications. In this investigation, we study the influence of dispersed phase concentration on droplet size distribution, physical stability, and rheological properties of highly concentrated eco-friendly emulsions. The laser diffraction technique revealed submicron droplet sizes for all studied emulsions. A coalescence process was detected in the most concentrated emulsions, not only by laser diffraction measurements, but also by rheology. Increasing the dispersed phase concentration from 30 to 45 wt % y...