Real atom economy and its application for evaluation the green degree of a process

Abstract

Green chemistry has attracted more attention in the past century. Among the 12 principles of green chemistry, only atom economy and E factor can be expressed quantitatively to depict the impact of a chemical process to environment. Atom economy was thought better than the traditional yield for evaluating the atom efficiency of raw materials. But it is not enough to reflect the conversion degree of raw material. In this paper, we proposed the concept of real atom economy (RAE) as a metric. RAE could combine the above two factors together to better express the green degree of a process. We further suggested an equation to correlate E factor with RAE. The concept of RAE is proved to be helpful for estimating an environmentally benign process.

Keywords

green chemistry / real atom economy / E factor / atom economy / yield

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