Not so green official analytical methods
In collaboration with scientists from the IUPAC project “Greenness of Official Standard Sample Preparation Methods”, we have evaluated the environmental footprint of 174 official analytical methods and 332 method variants from ISO, CEN, and major pharmacopoeias using the AGREEprep assessment tool. The results reveal that most standard methods still rely on solvent-intensive, energy-demanding, and waste-generating sample preparation procedures, with 67% scoring below 0.2 on a greenness scale from 0 to 1. By identifying the key weaknesses of current workflows, this study highlights the urgent need to modernize official methods and accelerate the adoption of greener, more sustainable sample preparation technologies already available to the analytical community…