(335i) Developing the Green Chemistry Principles

Developing the Green Chemistry Principles
Weiquan Cai

School of Chemical Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Luoshi Road
205#, Wuhan 430070, P. R. China
E-mail address: caiwq@whut.edu.cn, wqcai@home.ipe.ac.cn

To reduce or eliminate chemical pollution in origin is the ideal of green chemistry,
while its principles are the best elucidation for its essence. Based on the 12 wellknown
principles proposed by Anastas et al in 1998, the 12 more principles were
complemented by Anastas himself and Winterton, respectively from technical,
economic and commercial considerations. Unfortunately, these principles don’t
explicitly include concept which is highly relevant to environmental impact. As a
result, the concept of green engineering and its principles were proposed. Tang et al
subsequently simplified the original 12 green chemistry and 12 green engineering
principles proposed by Anastas et al as the mnemonic, communicative and
popularized “IMPROVEMENTS PRODUCTIVELY”. However, the principles are
still intuitive and commonsensible and thus can’t explicitly reflect the inherent
relationships between the goal and related research fields of green chemistry. It is
estimated that the green chemistry principles which are centered around designation
of green, coordination of Atom Economy and Effective Mass Yield etc., data
collection of life-cycle assessment, integration of properties of catalyst with reaction,
separation and recycling use, and the optimization and balance of evaluation metrics
and methods to greenness etc. still need to be developed and upgraded over a long
period of time.