Professors Trost and Sheldon’s Promotion of Catalytic Technologies, Atom Economy, and the E-Factor Metrics in Synthetic Organic Chemistry and the Fine Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries, to Speed the Early Evolution of “Green Chemistry”

What is it about?

The article describes some history of the early evolution of "Green Chemistry", years before the "12 Principles of Green Chemistry" were published. This article, one of a series, applauds the early 1990s contributions of Professor Barry Trost and Professor Roger Sheldon that encouraged use of catalysis as a tool to achieve high levels of Atom Economy and excellent "E-Factors). However, both men admitted that catalysis and Atom Economy "principles" had been in commercial use in the Commodity Chemicals Industries for many prior decades, but championed the use of those "Principles" in the Pharmaceutical and Fine Chemicals industries that used traditional methods of organic chemistry and as a result had highly inferior environmental and economic performance. The article also highlights that the industrial approaches had also been interdisciplinary (rather than "Chemistry Focused" for those prior decades, and applauds the recent trends back toward evolutionary, international, and interdisciplinary approaches.

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Why is it important?

This article further demonstrates that "Green Chemistry" did NOT begin at the EPA and/or in Academia, or with the "12 Principles of Green Chemistry" in 1998, and that in fact it evolved and emerged from many semi-independent international and interdisciplinary "Pollution Prevention" processes from decades earlier.