Green profile tools: Current status and future perspectives

Abstract

The idea of Green Chemistry began to take shape in an increasingly important way starting in the 90 s when the impact of chemical products and processes began to be critically evaluated.

In the analytical chemistry field, green chemistry represents an essential factor to consider whenever a laboratory procedure is planned. Therefore, from the start it is necessary examine not only green chemistry (GC) but also green analytical chemistry (GAC). The impact of the GAC on publications shows how the trend has seen an exponential increase from 1995 to 2018. From here, it is evident how the GAC is increasingly essential in the analytical chemist work who needs uniform, impartial, and standardized tools and elements to evaluate the "green profile" of the procedures, also in order to perform a direct comparison between methods and procedures.

The purpose of this review is to report, compare, and critically evaluate the tools available today, such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), National Environmental Methods Index (NEMI), Analytical Eco-Scale, Green Analytical Procedure Index (GAPI) and ComplexGAPI, RGB (Red Green Blue) and White Analytical Chemistry (WAC) models, hexagon-CALIFICAMET, and finally Analytical GREEnness Metric approach (AGREE) and AGREEprep. This comparison was performed in the text after a short introduction to the concepts and principles related explicitly to GC, GAC, and Green Sample Preparation (GSP).