Driven by legislation and evolving attitudes towards environmental issues, establishing green solvents for extractions, separations, formulations and reaction chemistry has become an increasingly important area of research. Several general purpose solvent selection guides have now been published with the aim to reduce use of the most hazardous solvents. This review serves the purpose of explaining the role of these guides, highlighting their similarities and differences. How they can be used most effectively to enhance the greenness of chemical processes, particularly in laboratory organic synthesis and the pharmaceutical industry, is addressed in detail.
An inherently non-peroxide forming ether solvent, 2,2,5,5-tetramethyltetrahydrofuran (2,2,5,5-tetramethyloxolane), has been synthesized from readily available and potentially renewable feedstocks, and its solvation properties have been tested.
What is the most significant result of this study?Developing green solvents to replace petrochemically-derived conventional solvents is currently one of the major challenges in sustainable chemistry.T he most significant result of our work is that Hansen Solubility Parameter Space can be used to predict mixtures of two green solvents that have similar properties to conventional solvents such as chloroalkanes for which no effective single-component replacements exist. We illustrate the applicability of the methodology by applying it to solid-phase peptide synthesis and polymer dissolution, but many other applications can be envisaged.
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