Mankind has just begun to recognize that the most crucial factor to achieve the sustainable society in the future is green technology. Most countries support the development of green technology to prevent catastrophes from global warming, mainly in the areas of reducing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, most products we consume in everyday life are produced through chemical processes, and we often oversee the fact that the huge amount of waste and energy during these chemical processes will seriously influence our goal to achieve our future society sustainable. Thus the technologies to minimize the amount of disposed waste and energy consumption during chemical processes may be more important than to reduce the greenhouse gases. In this regard this review introduces the recent status of green chemistry and future prospects in order to help our chemists and engineers establish research projects based on the green chemistry principles.

Green Chemistry emerged at the end of 20th century, which aims the development of the technologies for the sustainable society at the molecular level. Most products we consume in everyday life are produced through chemical processes, and we often oversee the fact that huge amount of solvents are used and disposed. At the present time most solvents used in laboratories as well as industries are volatile organic compounds(VOC), which gives health and environmental problems. Therefore scientists are seeking new materials which have equivalent properties of VOCs as solvent, and at the same time gives no health and environmental problems. In this brief review, the author describes the present status of research and development activities of green solvent materials throughout research societies worldwide. At present the most attractive green solvent candidates are water, glycerol, supercritical carbon dioxide and ionic liquids. In order to give the pictures of these materials, the author tried to introduce the overall aspects of green solvents in various chemical reaction as well as catalytic roles.