Assessing the Greenness and Environmental Friendliness of Analytical Methods: Modern Approaches and Recent Computational Programs

Green analytical chemistry focuses on making analytical procedures more environmentally benign and safer to humans. The amounts and toxicity of reagents, generated waste, energy requirements, the number of procedural steps, miniaturization, and automation are just a few of the multitude of criteria considered when assessing an analytical methodology’s greenness. The use of greenness assessment criteria requires dedicated tools. We propose the Analytical GREEnness calculator, a comprehensive, flexible, and straightforward assessment approach that provides an easily interpretable and informative result. The assessment criteria are taken from the 12 principles of green analytical chemistry (SIGNIFICANCE) and are transformed into a unified 0–1 scale. The final score is calculated based on the SIGNIFICANCE principles. The result is a pictogram indicating the final score, performance of the analytical procedure in each criterion, and weights assigned by the user. Freely available software makes the assessment procedure straightforward. It is open-source and downloadable from https://mostwiedzy.pl/AGREE.

It is not easy to find appropriate tools for the evaluation of the “green” nature of analytical methodologies which involve the use of compounds, materials, or chemicals manufactured prior to the analytical step. It is not easy to find appropriate tools for the evaluation of the “green” nature of analytical methodologies which involve the use of compounds, materials, or chemicals manufactured prior to the analytical step. Here, we propose a new metric for the evaluation of analytical procedures based on the GAC attributes. The proposed solution expands on the well-known green analytical procedure index by adding additional fields pertaining to the processes performed prior to the analytical procedure itself. Each field of the hexagon that was added to the GAPI pictogram corresponds to a different aspect of the described process and is coloured green if certain requirements are met. To showcase the utility of the proposed metric, it was used to evaluate analytical protocols for the determination of pesticides in urine samples. We believe that, following GAPI's success, ComplexGAPI will also gain attention and eventually trust and acceptance from the chemical community. To facilitate the use of this tool, we have created freeware software for generating the ComplexGAPI pictograms.