Planetary metrics for the absolute environmental sustainability assessment of chemicals.

ABSTRACT: Environmental assessments in green chemistry often rely on simplified metrics that enable comparisons between alternative routes but fail to shed light on whether they are truly sustainable in absolute terms, viz. relative to the Earth's ecological capacity. To expand our currently limited knowledge of the extent to which chemicals are environmentally sustainable, here we analyse 492 chemical products through the lens of seven planetary boundaries representing critical biophysical limits that should never be exceeded. We found that most of them transgress these environmental guardrails, mainly the ones strongly connected to greenhouse gas emissions (i.e., climate change, ocean acidification and biosphere integrity). However, their levels of transgression fail to correlate wit

SUBMITTER: Tulus V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8667789 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature