Green Chemistry

Green chemistry applies a defined set of principles — first articulated by Paul Anastas and John Warner as the Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry — to...

Green chemistry applies a defined set of principles — first articulated by Paul Anastas and John Warner as the Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry — to minimise the environmental and safety impact of chemical synthesis, encompassing waste minimisation, the use of safer solvents and auxiliary substances, energy efficiency, and the preferential use of renewable feedstocks. Within pharmaceutical synthesis specifically, green chemistry metrics such as atom economy (the proportion of reactant mass incorporated into the desired product) and Process Mass Intensity (the ratio of total material input to product mass output) provide quantitative benchmarks for comparing the environmental efficiency of alternative synthetic routes, and are increasingly incorporated into route-selection decision-making by major pharmaceutical manufacturers as both a genuine sustainability commitment and a source of manufacturing cost reduction, since a lower-waste process is frequently also a lower-cost process at commercial scale.