Green
analytical chemistry focuses on making analytical procedures
more environmentally benign and safer to humans. The amounts and toxicity
of reagents, generated waste, energy requirements, the number of procedural
steps, miniaturization, and automation are just a few of the multitude
of criteria considered when assessing an analytical methodology’s
greenness. The use of greenness assessment criteria requires dedicated
tools. We propose the Analytical GREEnness calculator, a comprehensive,
flexible, and straightforward assessment approach that provides an
easily interpretable and informative result. The assessment criteria
are taken from the 12 principles of green analytical chemistry (SIGNIFICANCE)
and are transformed into a unified 0–1 scale. The final score
is calculated based on the SIGNIFICANCE principles. The result is
a pictogram indicating the final score, performance of the analytical
procedure in each criterion, and weights assigned by the user. Freely
available software makes the assessment procedure straightforward.
It is open-source and downloadable from
.
In recent years, ionic liquids and deep eutectic mixtures have demonstrated great potential in extraction processes relevant to several scientific and technological activities. This review focuses on the applicability of these sustainable solvents in a variety of extraction techniques, including but not limited to liquid- and solid-phase (micro) extraction, microwave-assisted extraction, ultrasound-assisted extraction and pressurized liquid extraction. Selected applications of ionic liquids and deep eutectic mixtures on analytical method development, removal of environmental pollutants, selective isolation, and recovery of target compounds, purification of fuels, and azeotrope breaking are described and discussed.
This perspective addresses the replacement of harmful organic solvents by a novel generation of promising alternatives using sustainable analytical methodologies.
The selection of suitable solvents is a crucially important subject in a wide range of chemical processes. The study presents a solvent selection guide where 151 solvents were assessed, including a significant number of recently reported bio-based solvents. The assessment procedure involves grouping of solvents according to their physicochemical parameters and ranking within clusters according to their toxicological and hazards parameters. Grouping of solvents resulted in formation of three clusters -nonpolar and volatile (35 solvents), nonpolar and sparingly volatile (35 solvents) and polar ones (81 solvents). The comparison of toxicological and hazard related data indicated that solvents from the third cluster should be preferentially chosen. Within each group, a solvent ranking was performed by means of the TOPSIS procedure based on 15 different criteria. Because of lack of certain data (especially toxicological), different ranking confidence levels were introduced. The highest confidence rankings were performed only for some solvents but with all considered criteria. Low confidence rankings were created for all solvents but were based on certain criteria only. The results of our solvent selection guide (SSG) are generally in agreement with results of others but allow for finer ranking of solvents. The assessment procedure is easy to be adapted to individual chemist's needs and allows to include new solvents to the ranking.
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