Preface to the First Edition Free

The principles of Green Chemistry are reaching into all the chemical disciplines. There is increasing demand for chemical analysis and the development of analytical chemistry continues at a steady rate. Every new discovery in chemistry, physics, molecular biology and material science has an application in analytical chemistry as well.

The use of toxic compounds and solvents in chemical analysis is an extremely pressing issue that makes Green Analytical Chemistry an emerging hot topic in industrial and governmental laboratories as well as in academia.

However, the relationship between Green Chemistry and Analytical Chemistry is especially close because analytical chemistry provides the means of evaluating and justifying Green Chemistry and is an efficient tool for determining the “greenness” of a chemical product or technology.

On the other hand, methods of chemical analysis cannot avoid the use of solvents, reagents and energy, and thus generate waste. The application of a Green Chemistry perspective in the assessment of analytical methods should be a natural development in chemistry and should coincide with its basic policy. Being green is a “must” in contemporary chemical analysis, i.e. the true cost of resources and generation of waste must be included in the design of every new method and in every comparison of procedures. It can be said that the goal of Green Analytical Chemistry is to employ analytical procedures that generate less hazardous waste, are safer to use and more benign to the environment.

This book is a modest attempt to portray the changing situation in analytical chemistry with regard to adopting the principles of Green Chemistry. There are many other textbooks on different aspects of Green Chemistry, but none on Green Analytical Chemistry. We hope to fill this gap to some extent. The rationale for writing this book on Green Chemistry is to describe the current application of green principles in analytical chemistry and to comment on what more needs to be done. The main emphasis in analytical chemistry is on the metrological quality of the data, and only recently has attention been directed toward the environmental aspects of the way the data are obtained. In view of the theoretical as well as the practical importance of this subject, we urge the scientific community to exert itself in this respect.

The first two chapters are devoted to the general aspects of Green Chemistry and trends in analytical chemistry. An overview is provided of existing techniques for sample preparation and instrumental analysis in the context of solvent usage and safer chemicals. The next chapters review the current knowledge and efforts in this area, and cover diverse fields of instrumental analytical chemistry, such as separation science, optical and mass spectrometry, and analytical electrochemistry, that could guide others to new ideas and discoveries. The book endorses some prospective methods such as capillary electrophoresis and chemometrics that have been somewhat neglected in the literature on Green Chemistry. Microfluidic technologies have enabled the miniaturisation of established analytical techniques and enhanced performance. The expression “small is beautiful” is more valid in Green Analytical Chemistry than in many other situations. Micronisation can also be exploited to develop completely new approaches to chemical and biological processing.

The book describes efforts to make analytical chemistry greener: the application of Green Chemistry ideas and concepts in chemical analysis, an evaluation of the performance of current analytical methodologies from the perspective of Green Chemistry, and a discussion of the concept of green profiles of methods. We must emphasise that every step toward greening a particular method must respect the main analytical parameters such as selectivity, sensitivity, reliability, analysis time and cost.

This book has been written from an academic point of view; it is meant for senior scientists as well as novices who are just entering the field. The prospective audience for this book is likely to be managers of analytical research laboratories, but the book will also be of interest to teachers of analytical chemistry and even to green politicians.

We obtained most of the information for the book from the publications of scientists in this field. However, we did not attempt to provide a complete review of the literature on this topic. We tried to identify the general trends and the most promising applications that would profit from more attention for further development. There were also time constraints that required us to finish the work by mid-2009. We take responsibility for the choices made in selecting the topics and would be grateful for readers’ comments on errors, oversights and other useful data on the systems discussed.

Our sincere thanks are devoted to Dolores Talpt Lindsay for her fruitful cooperation and serious efforts to improve our language and Jekaterina Mazina for her help with the illustrations. We are also grateful to the Tallinn University of Technology for supporting the preparation of this book.

Mihkel Koel and Mihkel Kaljurand

Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia