Developing the Green Chemistry Principles

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 well-known 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 memonic, 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.