4 Introducing green chemistry

In the 1990s, American chemists Paul Anastas and John Warner introduced the concept of green chemistry. Green chemistry is a set of twelve principles that view industrial scale chemical production in an environmentally sustainable, and economically viable way. In fact the principles are equally applicable to the chemist working in the laboratory.

Section 4.2 will look at the application of these principles but first you’ll consider an important indicator of the efficiency of a chemical reaction, in other words how successful a reaction is at converting reactants to products, with as little waste as possible.