HPLC-EAT (Environmental Assessment Tool): A tool for profiling safety, health and environmental impacts of liquid chromatography methods

Abstract

A simple and efficient approach for profiling the greenness of high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) methods is presented. This environmental assessment tool (EAT) takes into consideration the environmental, health and safety issues for all solvents involved in the chromatographic method, and calculates a total score that can be used for comparison of the greenness of different methods. A software, HPLC-EAT, has been designed to facilitate the calculation and can be downloaded free of charge at http://www.biotek.lu.se/hplc-eat/. HPLC-EAT was successfully applied for a set of different HPLC methods from the literature, including both analytical and preparative chromatography. The performance of the tool was validated and it was further combined with another free software Eco-solvent tool to perform life cycle assessments of waste disposal options of distillation or incineration. HPLC-EAT can be routinely used in method development to calculate the greenness beside the conventional standards of accuracy, robustness and reproducibility.Although analytical chemists have considered environmental improvements important for a long time, the interest for green analytical chemistry has exploded during the last few years, as evident, for example, from the large number of publications and the special issue devoted to this subject by Trends in Analytical Chemistry (2010, volume 29, issue 7). 1-5 Green analytical chemistry goes hand in hand with the wellknown concept of green chemistry, 6,7 and can be summarized by

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