The nexus between alternatives assessment and green chemistry: supporting the development and adoption of safer chemicals

Abstract

Alternatives assessment and green chemistry share a common goal of supporting the transition to safer, more sustainable chemicals, materials, and products. Yet the two fields, and their respective scientific communities, are not well integrated. To better understand the nexus between alternatives assessment and green chemistry as complementary approaches to support the development and adoption of safer, more sustainable chemicals for specific functional uses, this article discusses the foundations of the two fields and examines two case examples in which companies have utilized the tools and approaches of both disciplines in developing safer chemical solutions. This research demonstrates the importance and utility of the overlapping skillsets and tools of the two disciplines and the potential benefit of educational opportunities and collaborative spaces in jointly strengthening both fields. Additionally, the literature and case examples identify a number of research and practice needs that would bolster the application of both alternatives assessment and green chemistry in supporting the transition to safer, more sustainable chemistry, including: clearer definitions and criteria of what is 'safer'; improved approaches to evaluate potential unintended consequences of chemical applications; and more effective tools to evaluate toxicity, consider inherent exposure trade-offs, and combine multiple attributes to make an informed decision.

Biopesticides in Sustainable Agriculture: A Critical Sustainable Development Driver Governed by Green Chemistry Principles

“…Principle 6 is concerned with an efficient and judicious use of energy achieved through catalysis, solventless reactions, synthetic photochemistry, and microwave-assisted synthesis (Jessop et al, 2008;Kharissova et al, 2019). Attributes of sustainable agriculture include but not exclusive to the application of green chemicals (GCP4, 7, 8, and 10), environmental conservation (GCP1, 2, and 11), judicious use of natural resources, and employment of safer (GCP3,5,8,9,and 12) technology (Sheldon, 2017;Tickner et al, 2021). Correspondingly, these attributes are also linked to SDGs that are directly linked to sustainable agriculture.…”

“…The use of green agro-products can influence SDG2 and SDG1, while SDG6, SDG12, SDG14, and SDG15 can be influenced by conservation principles, environmental sustainability, and judicious use of critical resources. These goals are reflected in GC, which aims to mitigate harmful chemicals from production down to application, process safety, optimal energy consumption, and improved economy (Tickner et al, 2021). The two priority massbased metrics upon which the GC partly rest on are atomic economy (AE) and environmental impact factor (E factor).…”

The green solvent: a critical perspective

“…A wealth of additional studies, too many to survey comprehensively, have focussed more narrowly on the replacement of: (i) a single solvent, such as N -methylpyrrolidone (Sherwood et al 2016 ) or N,N- dimethylformamide (Linke et al 2020 ); (ii) a solvent type, such as dipolar aprotics (Duereh et al 2017 ) or chlorinated organics (Jordan et al 2021 ); (iii) a reaction medium for a particular reaction (Avalos et al 2006 ), such as amide coupling (MacMillan et al 2013 ), aldehyde reductive amination (McGonagle et al 2013 ) or the Delépine reaction (Jordan et al 2020 ); (iv) a solvent in a process (Avalos et al 2006 ; Fadel and Tarabieh 2019 ), such as membrane production (Xie et al 2020 ); (v) one or more solvents in a series of products (Isoni et al 2016 ); (vi) one or more solvents in an application, such as cleaning, (Tickner et al 2021 ), lubrication (Dörr et al 2019 ), chromatography (Taygerly et al 2012 ; MacMillan et al 2012 ), or product recovery (López-Porfiri et al 2020 ); (vii) one or more solvents in a technology, such as carbon capture (Borhani and Wang 2019 ), or water-based metal extraction (Binnemans and Jones 2017 ; Peeters et al 2020 ); or (viii) the optimised selection of solvents and anti-solvents in pharmaceutical recrystallization from a defined set of 68 compounds (Tan et al 2019 ).…”

“… 19 Tickner et al ( 2021 ) report that the development by Eastman Chemicals Co. of butyl 3-hydroxybutyrate (RN 53605-94-0) as the industrial cleaner, Omnia™, began with a database of ca. 3000 possible candidates.…”

“… 20 The lack of integration between green chemistry and the wider effort searching for alternative chemicals has also been discussed in a recently published perspective (Tickner et al 2021 ). The perspective analyses factors are behind this lack of integration.…”