The Principles Of Green Chemistry – Seventh Principle: Use Of Renewable Feedstocks

The push toward sustainability in the chemical industry hinges on adopting the Seventh Principle of Green Chemistry: prioritizing renewable feedstocks over depleting resources whenever feasible. While shifting the global economy to a fully biomass-based system—requiring about 25% of annual biomass to be captured for energy—seems challenging, real-world examples prove it's possible. Nations like Costa Rica and Germany have made significant strides, consistently generating high percentages of their power from renewable sources. Even at the laboratory scale, chemists can drive change by redesigning synthetic routes. For instance, developing a second-generation manufacturing process for a drug using a bio-renewable material like Cyrene instead of D-glucose, combined with enzymatic transformation, eliminated numerous steps, improved yield tenfold, and reduced the Process Mass Intensity (PMI) by approximately 70%.