ABSTRACT
Why should industrial chemists consider thinking “green”? This is a
question that continues to recur in the current chemistry literature
and is almost unavoidable, given the modern concerns of scarcity
and security of resources and good environmental stewardship. A
noteworthy article answering this question from a philosophical
point of view has recently appeared.1 The joint American Chemical
Society and Green Chemistry Institute Pharmaceutical Roundtable
has recently published a wish list of what it considers as priorities
for implementing green chemistry practices in the pharmaceutical
industry.2,3 A corollary practical question that arises is, Why should
industrial chemists consider using metrics as a routine tool as
they brainstorm for ideas at the design stage of synthesizing a
target molecule? The implementation of green chemistry practices
in the industry will depend on not only innovation but also a
sound and honest metrics assessment of the processes invented.
Performance metrics are the only way that one process may be
judged against another with respect to some given set of criteria.
The aim of this chapter is to convince the industrial chemist of
this fact and, by means of an example, to showcase key reaction
and synthesis metrics, how they are calculated, and how they may
be used in synthesis plan design at any scale of production. The
targetmolecule selected is oseltamivir phosphate (Tamiflu R©), which has been extensively reviewed4-8 and its synthesis plans assessed
from a green metrics perspective.9 The present chapter updates the
extensive green metrics analysis published in 2009 to include 19
new plans published since then, bringing the total number of plans
examined for this compound to 34.
