Issue 5, 2015

Towards a holistic approach to metrics for the 21st century pharmaceutical industry

Abstract

A unified metrics toolkit has been developed to evaluate sustainability of reactions, encompassing a comprehensive and holistic range of criteria for measuring how green a reaction is, covering quantitative and qualitative criteria both upstream and downstream of the reaction itself. In addition, three new metrics are proposed, optimum efficiency (OE), renewable percentage (RP) and waste percentage (WP). The structure of the toolkit is tailored to give a level of detail and complexity commensurate with the stage of research, with an initial ‘light-touch’ appraisal at a few mg scale through to very in-depth analyses incorporating lifecycle considerations at large (multi-kg) scale. The toolkit additionally allows benchmarking of reactions against state-of-the-art in terms of their ‘green credentials’. By promoting critical thinking in the user it also lends itself to being an educational tool, and its widespread adoption will support the training of a new generation of chemists to whom the use of greener and more sustainable techniques becomes second nature.

Graphical abstract: Towards a holistic approach to metrics for the 21st century pharmaceutical industry

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
11 Feb 2015
Accepted
27 Mar 2015
First published
27 Mar 2015
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Green Chem., 2015,17, 3111-3121

Towards a holistic approach to metrics for the 21st century pharmaceutical industry

C. R. McElroy, A. Constantinou, L. C. Jones, L. Summerton and J. H. Clark, Green Chem., 2015, 17, 3111 DOI: 10.1039/C5GC00340G

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