ABSTRACT
The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development in 1992 emphasized the sustainable development of human life. The output of the Rio summit clearly outlined and recommended several principles that all countries are advised to recognize. A couple of these principles stressed the need for the reduction and elimination of unsustainable patterns of production and consumption of substances that cause severe environmental degradation or are found to be harmful to human health.1 The role of chemistry in human sustainability, bearing in mind the global demand for environmentally benign chemical processes and products, stems from providing unique and cost-effective chemical procedures for pollution prevention. From this role, the concept of green chemistry has emerged and has been touching upon all aspects of chemical processes, starting from simple environmentally friendly chemical tests and ending with biofuel production scale-up processes. The green aspects of a chemical protocol stand upon 12 principles that aim at reducing or eliminating the use or generation of hazardous substances in the design, manufacture, analysis, and applications of chemical products.2 The discipline “green analytical chemistry” is concerned with the elimination of solvents in chemical processes or the replacement of hazardous solvents with environmentally friendly ones. The green analytical procedures used nowadays in modern analyte extraction techniques are normally designed by system miniaturization,3 which in turn promotes procedure automation and hyphenation to the separation techniques.4 These modern sample preparation procedures utilize different formats of mainly a miniaturized liquid phase, solid phase, sorptive phase, a synthetic polymeric nonporous membrane phase, or a liquid membrane phase, that is, a liquid supported in a porous membrane material.
